Stella of New Moon
by ruby gillis
Summary: After her husband's death, Emily and her eleven-year-old daughter return to New Moon. Please R&R!
1. A Wandering Star

Stella stood at the rail on the uppermost deck of the tall, stately white ship and looked down—it was a long way down—to the dark grey waves below

Stella stood at the rail on the uppermost deck of the tall, stately white ship and looked down—it was a long way down—to the dark grey waves below. How strange that they pounded and pounded against the boat but they hardly rocked at all! Mother had said that an ocean voyage was not what it used to be—that it was safe, that Stella should not worry—should not even think of the song that father had used to sing, _Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives…It was sad when that great ship went down._

Father had delighted in teasing her, but Stella was a sensitive child, and she did not like to be teased. She roiled over memories of little embarrassments for weeks, and her pale, moonlight-fair skin would flush over rememberings that tormented her—but that everyone else had forgotten. The slightest remark could make her lilac eyes fill with tears, and some of the more cutting ones—your_ father isn't like other fathers_—could send her into a fit of secret weeping. Stella often thought that perhaps the other children would not tease her so much if she had been allowed to stay in one place for more than a year or two, but Father had always wanted them to move around. He always said that there was so much in the world to see.

In her eleven years, Stella had lived in eleven countries. She had been born in Rome. She had spent her formative years in a pagoda-house in the far East—a hut on the Serengeti—a cabin in the Australian aboriginal outback—a cottage at the foot of the Swiss Alps—a thatched roof dwelling in England that had existed in the time of Queen Elizabeth—a rather tame ranch house in the Rocky Mountains, in the States—a houseboat on the River Nile—a lonely converted lighthouse off the Gibraltar straits—an adobe dwelling in the Castile region of Spain—and an apartment in the heart of Paris. That is where Father had died. Stella remembered the day as though it were yesterday, and not a full three months ago. In his last days, he had liked to stare out the window at the busy street below while Stella sat beside him with her sketchbook. She had been drawing the street scene—a gaily-dressed gipsy with floating shawls, the striped awnings of the _pattiserie _and _boulangerie_, and had been trying—and failing—to capture the exact color of the sky above everything—more than blue, oh, so much more than blue! Finally she had gotten something right and she had held up the book for Father to see.

"Look, dearest," she said, but she saw that his eyes had closed, and that his head on the pillow had turned to the side. He seemed to be smiling, and she realized with a shock that he had gone.

What would any other child have done in a situation? Her mother was out, so Stella could not call for her. She did not run away and hide, either. She did not even cry. They had known the end was coming for some time. She had simply sat down and made a quick sketch her father's face—the happiest she had ever seen it, since he had gotten so sick—and then she leaned over and kissed his lips.

"Rest peacefully, darling," she said, and pulled the blanket up to his chin so that he would not be cold.

Stella was surprised to find that with Father dead, things were not _much_ different. Oh, she missed running in to his room to tell him about her day, but he had been so ill for most of her life that he had not been able to go out, to have meals with them, to do fatherly things like carry her on his shoulders or take her to the seashore. It was Mother who did those things—dear Mother, who was everything that Stella wanted to be when she grew up. Mother, who was so quick and clever and _proud_—who could write the dearest fairytales, which she read at bedtimes—who was beautiful, so beautiful that a famous picture of her hung in the _Louvre_, only a few wings over from that other eternal woman, the Mona Lisa. Mother, who had decided, only a month ago, that she would pack up the flat in Paris, and go—home, she said, but Stella could not imagine what that meant.

When Mother said 'home' she meant Canada—she meant the Island—she meant New Moon. Stella had heard stories of New Moon, and felt like she knew its inhabitants very well, though she had never met them, really. Tall, stately Aunt Elizabeth—dear Cousin Jimmy, who wasn't a bit as queer as everyone said—and beautiful, sentimental Aunt Laura. Stella had a card from them every year on their birthday. They wrote often to Mother, too, and once Stella had espied a letter from Aunt Elizabeth: _Emily, do take the child and come home_. _We miss you_. Stella had jumped when Mother caught her reading it, but Mother only smiled, and said, "_That_ coming from Aunt Elizabeth, is an outpouring of the utmost order." But then Mother's smile had faded and she had cried, "Will I never—never again—see the moon rise over Lofty John's bush?" She went into her study and Stella could hear her writing, her pen scratching over the paper, for what seemed like hours. Stella felt sure she was writing about New Moon and she longed to read it, but Mother never showed it to her. No matter—she would see the place soon enough, for herself.

Oh, she was getting cold! She should not have been out on the deck for so long. Mother would be wondering where she had gotten to—and indeed, at that very minute, Mother's sweet voice came floating to her ears.

"Stella! Stella Priest, where are you?"


	2. At New Moon

"Emily, Emily

"Emily, Emily!"

The door of the house flew open and a tall, iron-haired woman dressed from head to foot in black—vintage of the last century—flew down the walk with surprisingly agility, given her age. Her face was shot through with wrinkles and from her expression Stella could not tell if she were smiling or about to cry.

"Aunt Elizabeth," Mother whispered in Stella's ear, and stepped forward into the old woman's arms.

But after the most cursory of embraces, Aunt Elizabeth seemed to recall herself. She stepped back and began rearranging her hair with quick, sensible gestures. "I'm glad to see you've arrived in one piece," she said, as though a moment before she had not been about to burst into hot, happy tears. "You look exhausted. You always did get those shadows under your eyes when you weren't sleeping enough. _Have_ you been sleeping?"

"I did a little writing on the boat," Emily said. "Aunt Elizabeth—this is Stella."

Aunt Elizabeth seemed to see her for the first time, the pale little girl holding tight to her mother's hand. What did she think when she saw the girl? Undersized—lanky, in the coltish way that children often had—and the black certainly wasn't her best color. But…

"Murray to the core," Aunt Elizabeth pronounced. "No Priest about her at all."

Stella felt a sudden flash of indignance—it came on her at times, so swiftly that she never felt it coming and it always scared her a little after. "_I'm_ Priest enough," she said, with what she soon after realized must be a healthy dose of impertinence. As quickly as it had come the swift feeling vanished, and she shrank back, afraid of what Aunt Elizabeth might say.

She did not _say_ much. She looked it. And then she looked at Emily and said, bewilderingly, "It's a little like looking into the past." To Stella she said, "Come in, child, come in."

"New Moon has changed," Emily marveled, as they went in to the parlour. "Oh, those colored grasses are gone—somebody got rid of them at last—and new furniture—new drapes—paint—Aunt Elizabeth, what is the meaning of this?"

"It's Andrew," said Aunt Elizabeth, with a wave of her hand. "He's 'renovating'—a fancy word for meddling in other peoples' affairs. _He_ hasn't forgotten that New Moon will be his one day, when we're gone. He first had the idea years ago when Laura was sick with the flu after the war. I suppose he thought that we wouldn't last much longer. I couldn't stop him—and—and—well, I do like the new paper." Aunt Elizabeth looked fondly at the print of blue-bells and cabbage roses splashed over the walls. "I picked it out myself, you know."

"The kitchen?" asked Emily, faintly. "Oh, _please_, Aunt Elizabeth…"

Aunt Elizabeth's brows darkened. "If you think I'd let that man into my kitchen then you've lost your senses."

"Oh, thank _goodness_," said Emily, relieved.

The kitchen was where they went next, and Stella felt immediately at home there. A cosy fire burned in the hearth that took up one whole wall, and the low ceiling and heavy beams reminded her of the Elizabethan cottage—one of her favorite places that she had lived. Father had been well, there, and they had been happy. She was glad Aunt Elizabeth had not taken them into the dining room, which was stuffy and formal and bore (Stella would come to know, later) the distinct decorative hallmark of Cousin Andrew's wife. She would never have felt at home at New Moon if the parlour had been her first taste of it.

Seated by the fire in a chair was a very pretty, plump woman with blonde hair—a sort of _dying_ blonde colour, Stella thought, and was pleased by the thought. She always liked finding a new, fresh way of expressing her thoughts to herself. To say that the woman had fair hair, or hair with white streaks running through it, would not have captured the air of brilliance that still hung around it. Like Aunt Elizabeth, she wore black, and like Aunt Elizabeth, her face was lined, but unlike Aunt Elizabeth she was pink of cheek and blue of eye, and there was a general sense of pleasantness coming from her—not, Stella thought, that Aunt Elizabeth was _un_pleasant. It was just that this woman seemed to exude kindness and rosy sweetness.

"Hello, Aunt Laura," she said.

Aunt Laura turned toward her, and Stella could see right away that something was not right with her eyes. They were not fixed on Stella's face, but on a point somewhere in the mid-distance. The left pupil was a marbled, milky colour. Stella realized with a shock that Aunt Laura was blind.

"It was the flu," Aunt Laura said, as if she knew what her young grand-niece was thinking. "Allan—Allan Burnley, our doctor—said it sometimes happens that way. Poor Allan—how I miss him! But I'm really very lucky," she added. "It could have been far worse."

Stella remembered something that her father had said about Aunt Laura, once: "The woman has the most infuriating way of making lemonade out of perfectly good lemons." But Stella did not think it infuriating. She thought it very brave.

Aunt Elizabeth set a platter of doughnuts on the table, and Aunt Laura, with surprisingly gracefulness, poured the tea by feel. "Cambric tea," said Emily with a grimace, and Stella sipped at her cup delicately.

"I like it," she pronounced. "It's good."

"So you see, Aunt Elizabeth, the child is _nothing_ like me," Mother pronounced.

"You're smiling, Emily," said Aunt Laura. "I can hear it in your voice." To Stella she said, "What do you think of New Moon so far, dear child?"

"I love it," said Stella, with surprising immediance.

"But you've hardly seen any of it!" cried Aunt Elizabeth. "I don't approve of the way young folk _love_ this and _love _that. Millie—Ilse's girl—_loves_ apple crumble and the next day it's blueberry cobbler. In my day, love meant a very certain type of feeling, not to be taken lightly."

"But I _do_ love it," Stella said simply. "My _soul_ can _breathe_ here."

Mother smiled at her over her cup. "And you'll love it even more with every day. I'll take you myself to see the Three Princesses—the Tomorrow Road—and Lofty John's bush—my bush, I mean. But I want Cousin Jimmy to show you around the garden—and the old orchard—as he did for me so many years ago. Oh, Aunties dear, where _is_ Cousin Jimmy?"

"Here!" cried a voice from the door and Stella turned and saw a very interesting looking old man. He _looked_ old everywhere—from his forked grey beard to the tips of his boots—except for his eyes. If Stella did not know better, she would have thought him straight out of one of mother's darling fairytales. He was smiling—but as she met his eyes a sudden, queer look came over them.

"Emily—Emily," he said, but he was looking at Stella. "Why, Little Emily's come back—you've brought her back with her—she is as sweet and dear to me as ever. She won't ever fade away, that little Emily of ours—she will always be so sweet—she has come."

Stella _wanted_ to feel a little afraid, but Mother had explained things to her, and said she must not—ever—be afraid of Cousin Jimmy. He was only a little eerie by spells, because of his accident, when he had been a boy. He blinked, and he was smiling again. It had gone.

"I'm pleased to meet you, pussy-cat," he said, "I'm very glad you've come."

"Take your tea, Jimmy," said Aunt Laura.

"_After_ you clean your boots," said Aunt Elizabeth.

Cousin Jimmy cleaned his boots and came back and they all sat down together. Stella sipped her tea and listened to them talk around her.

"You mentioned Ilse," Mother said, clasping her hands under her lap. "Oh, _is_ she around? The last I heard from her was when Perry was elected MP—but that was years ago—and Ilse seemed to suggest they would live in Charlottetown year-round."

"Perry's MP for this district," Aunt Elizabeth said, "So he has to spend part of the year here—canvassing—and the like. They moved into Allan's house when he passed and Ilse's decorated it so that it looks like a gin-joint—of course. Young Peter," (who was called Pierrot, but Aunt Elizabeth would never deign to use the 'Frenchy' name), "was fifteen in January and Little Millie—good gracious—she was eleven last month. How time does fly!"

"Eleven—like me!" Stella thought, enamored at the idea of a chum her own age. She had never had a real girl-friend before—she had not had many friends—apart from Father and Mother—who were _such_ good friends that nobody else seemed to matter. But now the idea of a girl-friend—and cousin, Aunt Laura explained, though distantly related—was intoxicating.

"I am glad to hear they're well," said Mother, her eyes large and limpid looking at the mention of her old friends. "Oh, I can't wait to get reacquainted with Ilse—I hope she isn't _angry_ with me for being such a bad friend all these years. But Dean was always so sick—and—and—Aunt Elizabeth, is there—is there anybody else from the old days around?"

"Why, yes," said Aunt Elizabeth, and a light came into Mother's eyes. Stella knew that light—it meant she was about to have the _flash_. But then Aunt Elizabeth said, "I believe you know Evelyn Norris, don't you—from Shrewsbury? Evelyn Blake, she used to be—she's living in Stovepipe Town now—or 'Stowes Glen,' as we're supposed to call it."

"That neighborhood has become very fashionable," Aunt Laura explained.

But the white light had gone out of Mother's eyes. She turned away from Aunt Elizabeth and began to chatter with Uncle Jimmy about her old garden.

Aunt Laura leaned over and whispered in Stella's ear. "Come with me," she said.


	3. Stella of the Glass

Aunt Laura led Stella up the flight of stairs to a little room at the very top—a dear little room whose windows looked out over the front door and garden

Aunt Laura led Stella up the flight of stairs to a little room at the very top—a dear little room whose windows looked out over the front door and garden. It was a very pretty, old-fashioned bedroom, with a wallpaper of diamonds and stars, homespun carpet, and fat, braided rugs.

"This was your mother's room—and her mother's before," Aunt Laura said. "I've been saving it for you—even before we knew you would be coming. I wouldn't let Andrew or Elizabeth—or Andrew's wife—in here. Nothing has been changed since your mother last left it."

Stella thought it a great luxury to have a fireplace all of her own, in the room she would stay in. It reminded her of the Swiss cottage. Oh, she could imagine herself stretched out before it on winter's nights, her sketchbook before her and her pastels spread out within arm's reach. Yes—she did _love _it, she thought, with a mental apologetic shrug to Aunt Elizabeth. It was a dear room. The best thing, Stella thought, was the full-length oval mirror which hung over the little funny, claw-footed table. They had never had mirrors when Father was alive—only a very small one in the bathroom—because he had not liked to look at his hunchbacked appearance. Stella had seen herself in pictures, of course, but she had never seen so much of herself at once.

Again, Aunt Laura seemed to read her thoughts. She sat down at the desk by the window and said, "Stella—will you come here—and let me touch your face? It will give me an idea of what you look like."

Stella moved closer and Aunt Laura placed her beautiful, perfumed hands at the crown of her head and began to move them slowly down. She felt Stella's cheekbones and lingered at her lips until they quirked in a smile. When she was done, she said,

"And now you must _tell_ me what you look like—so I will _really_ know."

"Oh—I couldn't _tell_ you," Stella said, doubtful.

"Why not?"

"Because—" she tried to put it into words, the way she felt. She could draw things, infusing them with the spirit of movement and grace and truth, but when she tried to describe these things they always felt flat, compared with her sketches.

Aunt Laura said, "I have an idea. If you can't tell me what you look like, tell me how you would draw yourself."

It was an intriguing thought. Stella had never attempted self-portraiture. She had a whole book of pictures of Mother and Father, and Gilda, the old French nurse, and the organ-grinder from the square and the fat priest from Gibraltar, and many other people from places she could not really remember. The idea of picking up a pen and drawing _herself_ was so novel that she felt drawn in by it. She stepped to the glass and considered her own face.

"I suppose," she said, "That I would start with my face. It is an oval—too long, really, but Mother won't let me cut a bang."

"Won't she?" asked Aunt Laura, and Stella could hear a smile in her tone.

"She says I will regret it later—because my hair is so wavy, you see. Father used to say that it had a tendency to stick straight up, like a porcupine—but that was when it was shorter. It's longer, now. And the colour is very dark—I would use a charcoal for it."

"Go on," said Aunt Laura.

Stella studied her reflection for a long while. It was interesting, to watch herself so closely. She was seeing things she had never known before. "My brows are straight across—I would use a charcoal for them, too. And my eyelashes—are _curly_! I'd do them in pencil—very fine—for they are lighter than my hair. My chin is—well, it's so _small_, Aunt Laura! I never noticed it before. And it is a little cleft."

"The Burnley chin," Aunt Laura pronounced.

"If I was flattering myself, I'd make it bigger and leave the cleft out," Stella decided. "But true to life—it's there. My eyes are a _little_ too large and tilt up at the ends—the color is a very pale lilac-gray—I would use gray with a tinge of blue in it to make the color exactly. It's so funny," she went on, pulling expressions at herself. "Normally I look like _myself_—but when I turn three-quarters profile and smile a certain way—I look like the girl in the picture on the wall here."

"Juliet," Laura Murray breathed. "Tell me, Stella—do you look like your father at all?"

"I'm not jar-backed," said Stella sharply.

"I didn't mean that," Aunt Laura explained. "I never thought you might be."

Stella breathed out in a great breath. "I apologize," she said. "It's just that Father was so self-conscious of it, you know—and I was, a little, too. So many people thought him ugly, but to me—he was just Father. And to answer your question: I _think_ my mouth is a little like his when I think of something I want very badly. It quirks up at the corners, then. And there's a dimple in my bottom lip—a little heart-shape." She was thinking how she would use her pencils to shade it in.

"Dear," asked Aunt Laura very suddenly. "Was your father—kind to you?"

"Of course he was," Stella said, shocked and upset almost to tears. "What kind of question is that? Why would you ask me such a thing?"

"I'm sorry," Aunt Laura apologized. "But you see—Dean was a very strange man—I don't mean his back, I mean that—well," Aunt Laura was almost crying now. "I mean that I never really understood him. "He was so—possessive—and then we never _saw _you—and Emily didn't write us for so long and I thought—but I shouldn't be saying this to a child, a child! What a beast I am!"

"You _shouldn't_ be saying it," Stella said, a little coldly. She _was_ crying, now. "Aunt Laura—I think I want to be alone for a little while."

"Of course," Aunt Laura said, "I am sorry dear—I shouldn't have spoken. I'll leave you—but I'll need your help going down the stairs."

Stella led her down the stairs and deposited her at the bottom, and then climbed slowly back to the lookout room and lay very still on the bed. Uncle Jimmy brought the suitcases up and left them by her door and Stella knew she should unpack them but she could not make herself move. She was thinking of what Aunt Laura had said—and how Aunt Elizabeth had declared there was 'no Priest' in her. Why should she sound so victorious when she said it? What was there wrong with being Priest?

She did not want to believe anything bad of her father. But _why_ hadn't they ever come back to the Island, when he had been alive? She seemed to remember that he had been a little sneering whenever Mother got a letter from New Moon. Why should he be that way? She remembered snippets of things he had said, in a dry voice, "Not _writing_, are we, Star?" and mother saying, "No, no, Dean—just a quick letter to Ilse." And at first Father had been so—well, a _little_ disapproving—every time Stella asked him for pocket money to buy a new sketchbook.

The sun went down and the little room became very dark. There were no lamps in the room, only tall white candles in holders scattered here and there.

Mother came up to find her. "Are you tired, dearest?" she asked, and Stella said, "No, mother." Mother sat and smoothed her brow, over and over. Finally when it was quite dark, and she was sure Mother could not see her face, she turned over and asked,

"Mother—Father _was_ a kind man, wasn't he?"

"He was the most intelligent man that I ever knew," said Emily honestly, "And you were the light of his life, his little star. He rejoiced in you, you know—he often said you were the best parts of us put together. Do you remember that, Stella?"

"Yes," said Stella. After a while, Mother got up and left the room, pulling the door closed gently behind her. Stella heard her walking down the stairs again. It was only when Mother was gone that she realized she had not answered her question about father being kind.

"He was," she said fiercely. "He _was_."

She ended her first day at New Moon by sobbing into her pillow.


	4. Today's Child

Stella awoke to an impish face peering down at her

Stella awoke to an impish face peering down at her.

To tell the truth, it was not a very pleasant way to wake up, especially when one has spent the near-entirely of the previous night tossing and turning on a strange mattress in a strange place, and of course when one has cried one's self to sleep, to be awoken in such an unconventional manner is very unfortunate indeed. Stella looked down and saw that at some point Mother had come in and put her into her pajamas—her oldest pajamas—the faded fuzzy ones with little smiling rabbits up and down the arms and legs. She could not see herself in the mirror, but she felt that her hair was sticking up in a porcupinicular way—as her father had said it did.

In short—she felt very peevish, which was not her usual character.

"Who _are_ you?" she asked the girl attached to the impish face—such an impish face, full of deviltry and mischief. The girl had fat brownish-blond curls and very pretty amber eyes—and a cleft in her chin that matched Stella's own. The Burnley chin.

"I'm going to be your best friend," said the girl, and promptly jumped under the covers and snuggled up to Stella, and fell fast asleep, her head on her shoulder. Stella was so surprised by the whole ordeal that she did not know what to think. She fell asleep, too.

When she woke again, she was alone, and the sun was streaming through the windows in a manner that would have, by itself, suggested it was very late indeed—had not Aunt Elizabeth been calling from downstairs in a stern voice that it was almost noon, and that lazy girls who slept the day away were not tolerated at New Moon. Stella, who felt very disoriented, got up and shucked off her rabbit pajamas, and put on her nicest blouse and skirt, and made her way downstairs, trying to work her hair into a neat braid.

"I had the strangest dream," she said, to Mother and the aunts, who were waiting at the table. "There was a girl…" and then she stopped, because she could see through the window the very girl she meant, waving from the garden, curls tumbling in the wind.

"There she is," she said, faintly.

"And she's waiting with your breakfast," Aunt Elizabeth said. "Take this milk out—don't drop the pitcher—and make sure you bring it back in when you are done."

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"I wanted to have a _feast_ waiting for you," the girl said, spreading a red-checked cloth so that it snapped in the breeze—along with her curls, which were flying out behind her. She had never seen anything like those curls, and was already thinking how she would paint them—all the colours that she would have to use: cinnamon, ruby, ochre, roan. "I've been cooking ever since I heard you'd come—I got up before the sun to bake these biscuits and I'm tired—tireder than _you_ can probably imagine."

"I can imagine a lot of things," said Stella faintly, but her breakfast companion did not seem to hear.

"I didn't know what was your favorite kind of doughnut, so I've made four different kinds—glazed with sugar, glazed with chocolate, frosted and crème-filled. Crème-filled is my favorite, so if you don't like those especially, perhaps you could leave them for me. I could eat a wildebeest. Here is an omelette—the eggs are from your very own New Moon chickens—and here is some toast with raspberry jam. I put the raspberries up myself, last summer."

"Are they—still good?" Stella wondered.

"Of course they are!" the girl thundered. "Do you think I'd serve you bad food? They're called preserves, after all. Here's the butter—take some. Do you see how I molded it into a flower? I like for my eats to look nice as well as taste nice. I think it adds to the _ambience_, don't you?" She pronounced the word with all the panache of Gilda, the French nurse.

"I—do," said Stella, a bit discombobulatedly.

"EAT!" commanded the girl in a voice that made her jump.

As she munched away, Stella's mind worked. Finally she realized, and she wondered why she hadn't realized before. "You're _Millie_!" she said. "Aunt Ilse Miller's Millie. Oh—Millie Miller—I never realized how funny that is."

"It _isn't_ funny," said Millie. "Everyone always says that—_Millie Miller_—and I hate it. My real name is Emily, you know. After your mother. And you were supposed to be called Ilse, not Stella—after _mine_. But I'm sure you know about that."

"I didn't," Stella confessed. "And I'm not sure I believe it."

"Believe it, toots," said Millie unflappably. "Our mothers made a pact—a blood pact—a solemn, sweared oath—long ago, that they would name us after each other. _My_ mother kept up the bargain—but yours didn't."

"I don't believe my mother ever made a blood oath," said Stella, with (she did not know it at the time, but it was) a touch of the famous Murray look about her. "It would be beneath her. She only had to give her word as a Star. And if she did give it, I'm sure she wouldn't have gone back on it."

"Oh, _she_ didn't," Millie said cheerfully. "It was your dad. He didn't like my mother."

"I'm sure that's not true," Stella said, but deep down she was thinking that what she did know of Aunt Ilse made it apparent that she was not exactly the sort of person her father would have liked. She sounded too gay, too flamboyant. Father liked people who were a little subdued.

"So you get to be Stella, and I'm stuck with Millie," Millie sighed. "Horrid name. I would go by Emily but nobody will stick to it for more than a day. And I'm not sure it's much better."

"It's better than Ilse," declared Stella hotly.

"It isn't! Ilse is miles better than Emily, as far as names go."

"But Emily's _your name_," said Stella, exasperated. "If you say it's horrid you're only insulting yourself."

"Have another biscuit," Millie said. "And try some of the preserves. I didn't mean to say anything against your dad, you know. Lots of people don't like my mother. It's because she has no scruples. I tell you, she's a poor wife of an MP. Last Christmas at a state dinner she put a holly wreath on her head and sang the wassail song right in the face of the German foreign minister."

"Was she drunk?" inquired Stella.

"Heavens no!" Millie cried. "Ma don't touch the stuff. She's just gay and merry—merry all year round. I tell you, I'm like her that way. I _can't_ be in a bad mood. Sometimes I wish I could. My little kitten died last year and I wanted to cry but instead I kept thinking of all the good times we'd had together and I laughed instead. He was a dear cat. His name was Augustus Rainier Togod Sulamin the Fourth. I called him Gus. Say—do you like cats?"

"I like them very much," Stella said. "I am a cat-person."

"Say, I'm glad to hear that," Millie laughed. "If you're catless at the moment, I'll bring one over for you later. We have a whole bunch of kittens at our house. They are the great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of Daffy. He was your mother's and my mother's shared cat. But I expect you know all about that."

Stella thanked her and said she did.

"Have another biscuit," Millie urged. "Holy cats—you're so thin! I am, too. I'm glad. I'm sure fat was in fashion once but now thin is in. I'm going to stay thin and be a flapper one day. I have the genes for it, you know. Ma was awful thin in her day but ever since she had us kids she's had to be careful. She's on a diet now—nothing but celery and black coffee for eighteen days. She's sore because she's gained a pound and she's been on it fourteen days. Dad says he doesn't think it's possible, but Pierrot explained it to us. It has something to do with meh-meta-metaballisticism. Pierrot is my brother. He's going to be a doctor when he grows up."

"What are _you_ going to be?"

"I'm never going to grow up," said Millie matter-of-factly. "I'm going to be young and fun and gay my whole life through. Have another biscuit—if you don't eat it, who will? I ask you. Now—I want to hear all about yourself. Tell me—do you cook?"

"No," said Stella, feeling rather abashed in the face of Millie's feast. She suddenly wished that she _could_ cook—cook as nicely and scrumptiously as this shining-headed wild girl did.

"Don't worry about it," said Millie, rather charitably. "Lots of people can't cook. My mother can't boil water without setting the curtains on fire. But she can do lots of other things—she can recite the witches' speech from _Hamlet_ so that it makes your flesh creep away from your bones. Aunt Elizabeth was the one who taught me to cook—though she's not my _real_ aunt, you know. We're cousins, fifteen-and-a-half times removed. I tried calling her Cousin Elizabeth, once—and didn't she fix me with the evil eye!"

Millie laughed, but Stella felt a little wistful. She could see Millie in the kitchen at New Moon, at Aunt Elizabeth's elbow, learning to whisk eggs and set bread and licking the cake spoons and laughing. She knew a little instinctually that it should have been _her_ there, instead of Millie. She thought that she suddenly knew how Esau felt.

"Can you sing?" Millie wanted to know.

"No," said Stella.

"Can you dance?"

"No," said Stella. "I'm sure I could, but I've never really tried it."

"What! Not even the Charleston? I'll show you—dah-dah! Dah-dah! Dah dah-dah-dah _dah _dah….Well, can you play the piano? Or sing?"

"No—but," because she was feeling a little unaccomplished, "I can draw _rather_ well. Or so people say."

Millie regarded her suspiciously. After a moment she produced a pencil and a scrap of foolscap from the bottom of the breakfast basket. "Show me," she said.

A quarter of an hour later, Stella had produced a quick sketch of Millie herself—a witchy thing, that seemed to show what a laughy girl she was—though she wasn't laughing in the picture. She had managed to catch the shine of the sun on Millie's many-colored curls in a way that _almost _suited her. Millie leaned over to see it and gasped.

"It's—it's more like me than _I _am," she said, slitting her eyes at Stella in wonderment. "I've seen photographs that look less like me than this. Why, you_ can _draw—you draw heaps better than even I can cook. Do you know, there is a Famous Artist living in Blair Water? Mother and Father are friends with him—I wonder if they'll introduce you. Say, Stella—mightn't I keep this picture? Would you mind terribly giving it away?"

Stella signed it proudly and handed it over with a flourish—and a kiss. She decided she liked Millie. She felt she had proved herself with her drawing, the way Millie had with her cooking. They were on equal footing, now.

"We're going to be great friends," Millie said, gloatingly.


	5. Something about Loneliness

Millie and Stella had a golden day—full of getting to know yous, and laden with the beginnings of sweet things that would come to be tradition in years after

Millie and Stella had a golden day—full of getting to know yous, and laden with the beginnings of sweet things that would come to be tradition in years after. They went all over the place, and the promised kitten was delivered—a dear, white kitten, with tabby feet and tail—exactly the reverse of any ordinary cat. Something about the kitten's face reminded Stella of the picture of Juliet Murray that hung in her little room—it was sweet and open and flowerlike—but she seemed to know without being told that Aunt Elizabeth would never allow a pet to be called after a respected Murray ancestor, and a grandmother to boot. Stella and Millie decided on Jewel. The kitten followed them around the old orchard, weaving in and out of their ankles and mewling companionably.

There were Millie-made jam turnovers for an afternoon snack—such jam turnovers! Stella, who had supped on ambrosia and feasted on international delicacies thought that there had never been anything that so encaptured the taste of _summer_ and _good times_ as Millie's strawberry jam turnovers. Spicy, wholesome things! They made a feast of them, and while they were eating Young Peter Miller—Pierrot—came down and read to them from _Through the Looking-Glass. _He was a quiet, serious boy—with fair hair and round-rimmed spectacles that made his eyes seem very dreamy and far away. Of course he was ages and ages older than them—fifteen!—but he did not seem to cast it up to them at all. Stella thought immediately that Pierrot was a _chum_.

Ilse Miller had come up with her boy, and she and Emily Priest talked a little together as they got together a "pick-up" supper for the evening. The sound of their children's laughted floated through the open windows and Emily could not help but sigh. It was _right_ that her and Ilse's girls and boy should be friends—but she could not repress the idea that _this _was the way it should have been all along. It was the way they had always envisioned it being, when they were girls themselves. Ilse was still beautiful—she wore a belted silk kimono and the most cunning rhinestoned shoes—but she was also distant, and a little cold, at times. Emily finished slicing the bread and laid her knife down and went and wrapped her arms about her friend's plump shoulders.

"Ilse," she said. "Can't _we_ be the way we used to be? Or are those days over—ended? It would be terrible if they were ended—I couldn't bear it—but you must tell me truthfully if we can't go back. The only thing worse than growing apart would be if we pretended we hadn't."

Ilse shrugged out of Emily's grasp and rearranged some of the cold meats on the cut glass platter. She seemed to struggle for words for a while. Ilse!—struggling for words? Emily felt she had her answer when her old friend turned to her suddenly, longing written on her face.

"I _wish_ I could tell you that it was over—our dear friendship—I wish I _could_," she said passionately. "I'm angry with you, Emily—and hurt by you. I'd like to hurt you, too, but I can't. I love you just as much as I always did—I can't help myself. But it makes me shakingly angry when I think how—how you ignored us all these years. You are Millie's namesake and Pierrot's godmother—and yet you have never met them until today."

"I always _tried_ to remember things—birthdays—holidays…"

"Oh, you did," said Ilse cuttingly. "We could expect your gifts like clockwork. It isn't _that_ I really resent. Emily—Emily! Do you know that I never had another girl-friend before you? No one wanted to be my friend because I was Ilse Burnley, ragamuffin, daughter of an infidel and a possible—well, I won't use that word about my mother. And then when _you_ proved them wrong, I didn't want anyone else. I never had such a friend before—or since. Not even Perry understands me the way you do—did—_do_. And you—you went away—and—and…" Ilse turned away toward the window so that Emily could not see her face. "I've been terribly lonely all these years," she said, very simply and plainly.

"Lonely?" Emily marveled. "Ilse—dear Ilse—I could tell you a few things—I could tell you what it means to never call your soul your _own_—to feel cut off from the things you love—oh, Ilse, I could tell you about being _lonely_!"

Ilse turned and saw the tears that had gathered in the violet eyes.

"Was it really—so—bad, Emily? You—you never said—not really."

"Oh," Emily said, sitting down at the table and worrying her fingers through her hair, which (Ilse noticed) was just beginning to be streaked here and there with witchy silver. "I mustn't let you think that Dean was cruel to me. He _wasn't_. He _loved_ me. But there is a kind of love that is freeing—and there is a kind that stifles. Dean wanted me—all of me—and if I could not give it, he was unhappy. I couldn't bear to make him unhappy. He had been so unhappy for so long. So I gave myself to him—all of myself—and then I felt there wasn't anything left over for _me_."

"Oh, my poor dear—" Ilse began.

Emily waved her sympathy away. "I should have been the happiest wife in the world. And I was, in many ways. Ilse, do you realize that I've seen the seven wonders of the world—seven times over? But—but—at times, the only place I wanted to see was New Moon—the Delectable Hill, with the mist rising about it—the old garden where the red poppies grow—and you, standing in it, holding your hands out to me." A single tear made a dark spot on Emily's skirt.

"That will do very nicely as apology," said Ilse in a choked voice. She threw herself into her friend's arms.

The two women stayed that way for a very long time—so long that Aunt Elizabeth—who had _not_ been eavesdropping on the porch—not _exactly_—began to worry over them. But before she could find out what, if anything, had gone wrong, Emily spoke again.

"Ilse," she said, tremulously, as though she were a little afraid—"You know that I must ask you—I told myself I wouldn't, but I must, I must—Ilse, what has become of Teddy? Oh, do tell me—please. Is he—well?"

Ilse sat back on her heels and toyed with her fair curls. "Oh, you'll hate me I know," she said, finally, "But I _can't_ tell you. It's not that I won't—I can't, Emily. Teddy heard from someone who heard from someone who heard—he heard you were coming, and he wrote to me, and made me promise not to tell you anything. He is—still—very angry, you know."

"I do not blame him," Emily said. "'There is no love without forgiveness'—so I suppose I know where I stand, at least. Teddy couldn't have loved me very much, after all, I suppose."

"The harder the hurt, the harder the heart," quoth Ilse in return.

Emily conceded the point with a nod. But later, when the Millers had gone, and the house was dark and quiet, she could not stop herself from scrutinizing her reflecting in the dim little mirror in the her room—which had used to be Aunt Elizabeth's room—until she had had to move in with Laura, to help her in the night. Emily could not think of it as _her_ room—wouldn't be able to if she slept here a million years. She felt the ghost of a memory at her shoulder—she remembered the first night at New Moon, when she had been so homesick, and Fathersick, too.

"I wonder how old I'll be when I stop acting like a fool," said Emily to Emily-in-the-glass, who seemed to shake her head a little disappointedly, as if _she_ thought that foolishness would outlive Emily, and not the other way around.

It was a very tiresome thing to consider.

Emily crept down the hall and sat by her daughter's bed, stroking her hair and watching the girl sleep. Jewel-cat purred on her pillow, but Emily was not charmed by the sound. Three o'clock came and went and still she sat, feeling exactly like a woman carved of stove.

"Oh," she said, in a pitiful voice, but that was all. She would not allow herself to say _his_ name.


	6. Stella Goes to Church

The next day was Sunday

The next day was Sunday. Aunt Elizabeth woke early—and grimly. She arrayed herself in her second-best black crepe dress, tied a voluminous apron over that, and went downstairs to cook a gigantic breakfast, which she laid upon the groaning table with the savage fury of an archangel.

"Eat up," she told Stella. "But don't eat _too_ much. I won't have you falling asleep in church."

"Church!" cried Stella, her fork poised half-way to her mouth. "But—But I don't usually go to church, Aunt Elizabeth. Not regularly, anyway."

She said it as apologetically as she could but apparently not apologetically enough—for Aunt Elizabeth's eyebrows raised all the way up her brow to her hairline. She told herself that she shouldn't be surprised—what could one expect from the daughter of that—that—Dean Priest—but she had thought Emily at least might remember her responsibilities to the child. She looked so deadly cold over her breakfast plate at Stella that Stella began to think she might have said a very horrible thing, indeed. She wished Mother was here, but Aunt Elizabeth had said that Mother was sleeping, and had been up late. She was not to be disturbed. Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy didn't look _as_ shocked as Aunt Elizabeth, but Aunt Laura did look distresses and Cousin Jimmy had lost the sparkle in his eyes.

Eager to make amends, Stella said, "Of course Father _did_ take me to Mass at Christmas-time, and I loved it so much. It was so lovely, with the candles and the incense and the beautiful singing of the nuns…."

If Elizabeth Murray had not been a Murray she might have clutched her chest at such a declaration. As it was, her eyebrows went even higher. She did not deign to speak after such an utterance. It was Aunt Laura who asked, very gently,

"Do you mean—Stella—dear—that you and your father went—went to a—_Catholic church_?"

The comment, which had been supposed to break the ice, had only chilled it further.

"Ye-es," Stella admitted. "But you see, nearly everyone on the Continent is Catholic—Presbyterians were hard to come by and Catholic churches were _everywhere_. And Father always said that if he must have a spoonful of religion in his life, then it might as well be rich as chocolate cake, instead of dry and sour-tasting—I mean—I mean…" she trailed off, because Aunt Elizabeth's eyebrows had reached the apex of her forehead, and had no where else to go.

"It's the same God, isn't it?" she asked a little rebelliously.

"So the Catholics _say_," said Aunt Elizabeth, as though she had her doubts. "Tell me, Stella—did Dean Priest take you to—to—"

"St. Agatha's…"

"To _that place_ often?"

"No," said Stella. "Father always said that God knows us in our secret hearts—that if we go to church every Sunday, even when we _don't_ want to, he can see that was don't want to, and it's just the same as not going at all. Father and I would just decide that we were, well, _in the mood_, and if we were, we'd go."

"At New Moon we are _always_ in the mood to honor the fourth commandment," said Aunt Elizabeth darkly. "Now scoot upstairs and get changed or we'll be late."

xxxxxxxxxx

Stella 'scooted'—and before she knew it, she found herself in her best white lawn dress—the one she had worn to Father's funeral. Aunt Elizabeth had been vaguely disapproving of _that_, too. But Father had not wanted Stella to look like 'a raven of bode and woe' because of him.

"I wouldn't have minded wearing black," she told Aunt Elizabeth confidentially. "I think black is _very_ sophisticated. White does nothing for my complexion. I heard our maid Gilda tell our butler Gerard once that I was the sallowest child she ever knew. Black makes my skin look creamy—and it brings out the luster of my hair."

"I think it is very silly and vain for a child to talk in such a way," said Aunt Elizabeth. "It hardly matters what color you're wearing as long as you are clean and neat."

"But don't you think that it's nice to have your feelings inside match how you look on the outside? Sometimes I'm feeling _pink_ and I want the world to know it. I always _feel_ in colours. When I'm happy I'm the perfect green of the sea—the sea in the south of france—with the sun shining on it, through it. When I'm angry I'm ochre—when I'm hungry, I'm the exact color of bread—pale brown and perfect. But when I'm sad I'm never blue. Sadness is a no-colour colour—sort of misty grey-white, like a fog—it catches all the other colours and mutes them."

By the time the speech was finished, Cousin Jimmy had pulled up the car—a second-hand, jalopyesque thing, but new for New Moon—in front of the church. Aunt Elizabeth handed Stella a prayer book and spoke to her fiercely.

"Try and behave like a little lady and remember that Priest you may be, but you are also a Murray of New Moon."

Stella reflected that indignation was a deep, dark, tantalizing color—a dark indigo—the kind you could fall into and never climb out of.

The church was a peaceful place. She found she liked it more than she had thought. It had none of the old, mystic lure of the grey-stone cathedrals she had known, but it was simple and good and it made her want to be simple and good, too. Shafts of light came through the high windows, illuminating the secret world of dust motes. How they danced and roiled about! What a pity that it was impossible for her to catch them in her pictures! Stella snuggled into the corner of the pew until she remembered Aunt Elizabeth's edict. She sat up as straight as a ramrod, and began to leaf through her prayer book. Oh—she liked the Presbyterian church—but she thought it a shame that their prayers were not as interesting as the Catholics. They were wholesome and honest prayers, but they lacked the mystery and allure of certain phrases—_O, most Gracious Advocate—Mary, star of the sea—mourning and weeping in the valley of tears—world without end, Amen. _

The hymn was 'Ah, Holy Jesus,' and Stella enjoyed the singing of it very much. Such chilling words and melody: _Alas my treason/Jesus, hath undone thee!_ The choir sang, _I crucified thee_ and Stella was borne away on a wave of imagination. Suppose she should have been living at the time of the Crucifixion—what _if_ she had been caught up in that angry mob that holy day—what if, over the sea of heads, she had seen that poor stooped figure in its crown of thorns, shouldering his mighty burden? And what _if_ he had met her eyes with his lovely dark ones (for Father had explained that He _would_ be dark, nothing like the fair, flowing-locked man over the altar _here_). Oh, what a thrill of remorse she should have felt! How she would have run to him, and kissed his face. She could see it in her head, the whole scene, and resolved to spend an hour setting it down with her paints when she got home.

She was equally rapt through the text: _If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea_—and amazing vistas flowed past her inner eye at the words. A pink, pearly dawn, still touched around the edges with night—a vast, dark-as-black sea, with only the glimmer of the moon upon it. Stella was sorry when the minister stood up to preach. He was _not_ interesting, though he tried to be, and though she tried to make allowances for his shortcomings, she could not really pay attention. Of _course_ Jesus wanted everyone to be kind and generous! It went without saying! She was a _little _offended that he should feel the need to preach it at them so vehemently. What a long, dour face the minister had! Almost egg-shaped—a scruff of whiskers around his chin would be so much better. Almost automatically, her hands turned to the blank fly-leaf of her prayer book and she found in her pocket the scrap of pencil, and she sketched the minister's face—complete with whiskers. Oh, it really _was_ so much better!

Now that she had made that unbeautiful man into something more beautiful, she look stealthily around for her next project. She felt it would be disloyal to try and improve her aunts or her cousin, and so she settled on her neighbors instead. If that woman would take her hair out of it's hard knot, her face would look pretty. Stella drew her with her hair long and wavy down her back. She had gone from a grave-faced gimlet to a rounded, pleasant lady. If her companion _only_ had a widow's peak—she shaded it in. The sermon was a long one, and in it, Stella rapidly made-over nearly everyone sitting around her.

"There is only _one_ woman who I feel I _can't_ help," she thought, looking at the ash-haired, stately woman across the aisle and one row up, the woman with a large bosom and long, treacherous brown eyes. She was dressed very fine—too fine even for church, Stella thought. She thought very suddenly that there was nothing she could do to make the woman look _nicer_—except to make her frown lines smile lines, instead.

The girl sitting with the woman turned and, catching Stella's eyes upon her, made a face of such horrible disdain that Stella shrank back. In doing so, she caught Aunt Elizabeth's attention.

"Stop _staring_ at Mrs. Norris," she whispered. "And pay attention." The sermon was over—they were standing to pray.

The minister, having bored even himself with his long sermon, stifled a yawn and told the congregation to give silent thanks for something they were truly grateful for. Stella bowed her head and prayed fervently—so fervently that Aunt Elizabeth noticed it, and could not help asking about it on the way home.

"What _were_ you praying for, child?"

"I was thanking God for sending me to _you_," said Stella simply.

Her little face shone with radiant honesty and Elizabeth Murray could not help a flush of emotion from creeping over her stern white face.


	7. Secrets

Stella had decided on a project to occupy her idle time in the first of the long, hazy days of summer—not that she had very much free time, really

Stella had decided on a project to occupy her idle time in the first of the long, hazy days of summer—not that she had _very_ much free time, really. She had ever so much to do—she must feed the chickens in the morning and weed the garden-patch each forenoon—she must be ready to run errands in the afternoon whenever she was called—it was her sole responsibility to wash the supper dishes, and to pour the tea every night when they retired to the parlour after the meal. Less and less people were drinking tea nowdays—but Aunt Elizabeth was determined that _her_ niece should learn to pour correctly and gracefully. It was, she told Stella, sternly (and Mother repeated later, eyes twinkling) a Murray tradition.

Other children would have chafed under such a regimine, but Stella found that she did not mind it. She _liked_ feeling useful. She reflected that she had had so many days with nothing to do, before she had come to New Moon. She remembered the hot, stifling feeling of those days—and Mother's old saying, "Get leave to work—in this world tis the best you get at all." She remembered the queer bitterness of Mother's voice, sometimes, when she had said it—the pleading look as she knelt at Father's knee—and the look of staunch determination that had come across his features. It was a memory that made Stella feel coldly weird and creepy—she did not like it—and so she was _glad_ to work. She was remembering more and more things like _that_, lately—and the work helped her to forget, for a little while.

Mother—speaking of Mother—there were whole days when Stella saw very little of her. She had supposed that Mother must need a rest after those long months of caring for Father—she had heard Aunt Laura say that 'Emily is overtired'—but it was not _resting_ that Mother was doing in her little room. No—Stella had gone past once, expected to see Mother stretched out on the bed in her white dress, but instead she had seen her seated at the desk, writing feverishly in a notebook spread wide in front of her. When Stella had crept forward to see what it was that Mother was writing, Emily had shut the book firmly and said, in a voice that was falsely gay, that they should go down to the bay shore—it was perfect, this time of year, for bathing. It made her feel queer, remembering it.

"Move to the left," she told Millie rather absently—for that was her pet project for the time being—a series of portraits of Millie, in different moods—at different times of day—in interesting places. _Millie at the Shore—Millie at the Malvern Rocks—Millie on the Roof of Burnley House at Sunset _(this one would have sent chills up Aunt Elizabeth's spine, but when Aunt Ilse had looked up and seen them, from the yard, she had only waved)_—Millie Standing on Her Head in the Old Orchard_. Millie had such a _changeable_ face—it changed with her rapid-moving thoughts. It was a challenge to keep her steady enough for one moment to capture each one of them, but Stella was trying. Today was _Millie in the Hay Loft of the Old New Moon Barn_ and Stella was in raptures trying to catch the shafts of light that came through the slats in the boards and settled over the scene.

Millie moved accordingly and picked up the thread of her conversation as though Stella had not spoken at all.

"The woman you saw at church was Mrs. Norris," she said (in response to a question that Stella had asked some time ago), "Or as Mother calls her "that cauterwailing minx of an Evelyn Blake. Evelyn Blake was Mrs. Norris's name before she was married. She is an _enemy of our family_. It all began years ago when mother and your mother were students at Shrewsbury high school. Mrs. Norris was horrid to both of them. She played a horrible prank on your ma and blamed _my_ ma for it—and she black-beaned your ma out of the Skull and Owl Society—though she always denied it after."

"It all seems rather long ago," said Stella doubtfully. She was not sure she was entirely comfortable with the idea of a family _enemy_.

"Oh, that was just the start of things," Millie continued. "Mrs. Norris went away for a while—but then she married Mr. Norris, who was MP of this district for ever so long—until Father beat him out in the last election. That was five years ago. It should have been a good clean fight—that's what Dad wanted—but Mr. Norris went round telling people that Perry Miller had em-emb-embezzulated funds from the treasury. It _wasn't_ true—it was a horrid lie. Dad would never do anything like that. He's clean as a whistle, and everyone knows it—and knew it then. There was an investigation and he was cleared, but _Mr. Norris_ was another story. It turned out that he had been cheating pensions from poor war veterans. _I _think that he must be very evil to do such a thing—and very stupid to accuse Dad of doing what he'd done himself. He hadn't even tried to cover his tracks. He _must_ have known they'd find out. Anyway, Mr. Norris was in-ind-indicated, but before he could stand trial he dropped dead of a cor—coronationary and that put a cap on the whole thing."

"How awful!" cried Stella, putting her pencil down in her indignation. The _idea_ that anyone could accuse dear, jolly, upstanding Uncle Perry of—of—that! Stella had met Uncle Perry scores of times by now and he was well on his way to becoming one of her favorite people. He had let her draw him and he had _paid_ her for the portrait she had done of Aunt Ilse—a whole dollar—Stella's first commission of what (she hoped) would be a long and industrious career. She felt a simmering of anger at the bottom of her sweet heart for the stupid, swindling Mr. Norris.

"Mrs. Norris said _horrible_ things about our family when it was reported in the newspapers," Millie said, her face getting more and more cross-looking by the minute. Stella's hand moved rapidly to try to keep up with the changes that were swooping across it. "She said that Dad was a _murderer_ and that he could have called off the charges if he'd wanted to, but he didn't. And Flora Norris—you've seen her—has been awful to me ever since. You know—she's the girl with the riot of curls—and the smug expression on her face. I wouldn't mind her hating me—to be _liked _by such a person would be a bigger insult—but you see, she's got her heart _set_ on 'catching' Pierrot one day. She's fourteen—they are in the same class at Queens. And _you_ know how Pierrot is, Stella—_he_ wouldn't notice if his nose jumped off and ran away from his face. He is so intent on seeing only the best in every one he meets—such a bad habit!—and so he thinks Flora perfectly nice and charming. It is mine and mother's biggest fear that he _will_ marry her one day. Oh, I don't know what I'd _do_ if he did!"

"He's only fifteen—there's lots of time before he starts thinking of _that_," said Stella soothingly. "He may come to his senses yet. Turn your head a little to the right—just a little—there now, sit _still!_"

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It was not long after this interview that Stella got to meet Flora Norris for herself. It happened one sweltering June afternoon. Stella had been sent by Aunt Elizabeth to town to collect the mail. She saw the figure coming toward her from a long way off—first just a little blur far away down the road—then closer, and she saw the bicycle—then she saw the riotous, spun-sugar curls that Millie had spoken of. It was Flora Norris—in the flesh. As the girl drew closer Stella saw the smirk on her face—_and_ that she was wearing lipstick—bright red lipstick that matched the shiny paint on her bike. At that sneer, her timid heart began to thump wildly. She shrank over to the side of the road to let Flora pass, and told herself that there was no way the girl could know who she was. There was nothing to worry about—not really.

But then Flora swerved on her bike and headed straight for Stella. It had rained the night before and Stella's feet were sticking in the mud by the road. She tried to jump out of the way—_would_ Flora run her down? _Could_ one be killed by colliding with a bicycle? But she was not quick enough. Flora rode her bicycle close to Stella, aiming for the large, muddy puddle that had collected in the center of the road. Stella's white dress was sprayed with dirty water, and her face and hair were spattered with red clay. There was a nasty laugh, to show that the encounter had _not _been accidental. And then Flora was gone.

Stella walked home, shaken by the event. She had experienced many things in her young life—but she had never known what it was to have someone hate you before they even met you. It was disconcerting. She wondered if Father had ever felt this way, when people had jeered at him. She was so lost in thought that she did not notice at first when young Peter Miller stepped into place beside her.

"What happened to you, kidlet?" he asked, in the bemused, kindly way he had. "You're a mess." Stella noticed that he was not wearing his spectacles today. His eyes seemed very blue—she had never really noticed their color before. She brushed at her muddied skirt and contemplated his question.

"I don't think I'd like to tell you," she said finally. "It's not because I don't _like_ you, Pierrot—I like you awfully." This was said with a fierce sincerity that made Pierrot smile. He was a reasonably handsome boy, and he knew it, though he was not puffed-up about it—but all the same, he had not had a she-creature talk to him so plainly and without coquetry in some time.

"Why not?" he wondered.

"Because," Stella said. "The true story would not reflect well on someone who is a _particular acquaintance_ of yours."

"Maybe you should tell me, then. I don't want to be friends—or even acquaintances—with anybody who would tangle with you, Stella. Why—we're family, really. And in a family the cubs have to stick together."

Stella swished her skirt from side to side, dithering. Finally she said, "It's _awfully_ hard to know what is the right thing to do, at times, isn't it?"

"Whole books have been written on the topic."

"Oh—really? What do they say?"

"Generally, the conclusions are a tad contradictory," Pierrot admitted. "But I've heard said that the best way to find out what is right is to ask your heart."

"Well, I think my heart wants to keep the matter private," said Stella, looking so Elizabethan that Pierrot could not help but smile.

"I've heard," he said whimsically, "That two people can't _really_ be friends until they have a secret _with_ each other, and _from_ each other. So we are half-way to being friends, at least."

They walked on. Stella had succeeded in brushing most of the mud from her face and she gave her dress up for good. There wasn't going to be anything she could do about it, she reasoned, so why bother wasting any more thought on the issue? Instead she watched Pierrot slantwise from underneath lowered lashes. Once, twice. The third time she glanced up he was looking back, with a grin on his face.

"I wonder why you look at me that way?"

"What way?" Stella wondered. She tried to look very innocent; as though she'd been thinking of nothing, really, at all.

"Don't ever play cards," Pierrot told her. "I don't think you'd be very good at it."

Stella decided that she would tell him. "I was just thinking," she said boldly, "How you are so very different from everyone else in your family."

"Am I really? I wonder what you mean."

"Oh," trembled Stella, eager that she not have offended him, "It's just that Aunt Ilse is so gay and Uncle Perry so friendly and Millie so fun and laughy all the time…"

"And I suppose I am none of these things." He was a little cold, now. Stella did not know it, but it was not the first time Pierrot had been accused of being 'different,' and he was still very young—he had not learnt to appreciate his differentness yet.

"No!" she cried, tears coming into her eyes. "You are dreadfully nice, Pierrot. I just mean that you are serious—and quiet—and last night when we were playing statues in the garden—even Aunt Ilse and Uncle Perry—you were reading in your room. I don't mind—only I thought perhaps you want to play because _I _was there. It would have been ever so much more fun if you'd come down and played with us."

Her simple, unthinking compliment restored Pierrot's good humor. He grinned at her. Stella Priest was so very young and sweet in a way that Millie had never been. He thought it would be very nice to have a sister that looked up at you a little adoringly from under such curly, un-Murray-like lashes, instead of teasing you mercilessly and being a pest. He ruffled her hair and tried to explain to Stella a little bit about how hard he must study if he wanted to qualify for Redmond college in another three years.

"And besides," Pierrot confessed. "I take more after my Grandfather Burnley than my mother or dad. Don't _you_ have differences from your parents?"

"Oh, yes," Stella admitted. "I could never be as sweet as Mother—nor half so smart as Father—and—and—sometimes I think I'm _happier_ than my father was. Sometimes I don't think my father was—well, very happy."

"Why not, do you think?"

"I think that there was something Father wanted very badly but could not have," Stella said simply. "I don't know what it was—or if he ever got it." They had rounded the bend in the road. "I wonder sometimes if—oh! Pierrot! _Look_ at that charming little house over there!"

The 'charming little house' was indeed a very charming little house—a cottage, really—set back from the road in a copse of tall spruces, through which the Wind Woman from Mother's stories danced and played. A darling, cosy little house, shingled, but then shingles had never been painted and were now a very weathered gray. Someone had started a garden around it, years ago, but now it was wild and untended. Only the bones of the garden remained. It should have been a very sweet, happy place—but it couldn't be, because the windows were boarded over with rough planks, and the house had a very lonely air.

"Who _does_ it belong to?" she wondered, a little angrily. "It must not belong to anybody—because _nobody_ could treat this poor little house in such a terrible way. It wants to be loved."

Pierrot said nothing. He was an astute boy, and people often overlooked him when they were gossiping about certain things—it was easy to do, since he was, more often than not, curled up unnoticed somewhere with a book. But his ears were always listening, and his mind was always working.

"I must draw this place," Stella commanded. "Do you have any paper—and a pencil?"

Pierrot had both things in his pocket but he did not hand them over, queenly as she might be in asking for them. Instead he said,

"I don't know exactly who this house belongs to"—that much was true—"but I feel sure they wouldn't like us prowling around. We'd best be scooting along, kidlet."

Stella did not like his 'kidlet' this time. She felt there was something very patronizing about it.

"If it's a secret, you might just say so," she said very coolly. They walked the rest of the way to New Moon, she keeping her head held very high—that is, until Aunt Elizabeth opened the door and beheld her young great-niece, in all her mud-spattered glory.

"Stella Priest! What on earth happened to you?"

"I was running and I fell," she lied, glibly—so glibly that later she would feel badly over it. But at the moment she did not care. Her pride was too hurt for her to tell the truth. "Pierrot helped me up and walked me home."

"I've _told_ you not to run on the road," Aunt Elizabeth said, a little annoyed—for she _had_ told Stella just that, quiet often. "I expect you've ruined that dress. Go on up and get out of it and give it to me—I'll see if there's any way to salvage it."

"Yes, Aunty," Stella said, but before she went she linked her arm through Pierrot's quickly and gave him a little, friendly pinch. They each had a secret from the other—and now they shared one. It was just as he had said—they _were_ friends now.


	8. A Visit to Priest Pond

Emily Priest was searching for just the right word to describe the sky over the front garden today—it was blue, true, but it was so much more than that

Emily Priest was searching for just the right word to describe the sky over the front garden today—it was blue, true, but it was so much more than that. There was a little violet heat-haze hanging away over the dunes and rain threatened with a purple light from the east, though the clouds above the western pasture were still massed in stately golden splendor at the gate. It was a changeable sky, the kind of sky in which all weathers and all manner of things seemed possible. The storm could skirt off to the south and miss them and the golden clouds could roll in and cover everything in their honeyed light. Or else the storm could swallow up the sky with the weird green glow particular to Prince Edward Island thunderstorms. What _was_ the word? Emily wrote 'mercurial,' but almost as quickly, crossed it out. It was not what she meant at all. What was? Mystic—unpredictable—dazzling? Oh—no—no—she knew—it was on the edges of her mind, would soon be in the tips of her fingertips—she meant—she meant…

"What are you doing, Mother?"

Her daughter's little voice came from the doorway and Emily lost it—that wondrous word—and could not get it back. She set the pen down and tried not to be annoyed. It was not Stella's fault. Emily had the idea that she had been neglecting her daughter shamefully these past few weeks, and a look at the girl's white, anxious face moved her close to tears. She laid her pen down and closed her notebook, hating herself, and the story she had, only moments before, been enthralled in. It was nothing—cobwebs, as Dean might have said, if he had known she was writing again—and here was her little girl, who was _everything_ to her.

"Stella," she said, suddenly. "Let's go down to the kitchen and get a picnic and go and spend the day together."

The look of boundless delight on Stella's face made Emily feel even more wretched—so wretched, really, that she forgot about the roiling thunderclouds in the east as she put together the basket they would take along on their rambles. Stella had begun chattering and had hardly stopped to draw breath. Emily realized it had been a great many days since she and her daughter had had one of their heart-to-hearts. Possibly not for weeks—months. Maybe even so long ago as before Dean had died.

They set out together, hand in hand, and Emily asked Stella where she would like to go. "Oh—the Malvern Rocks!" cried Stella, and Emily felt a pang, that her and Dean's daughter should want to go there, to the place where, so long ago, their fates had become entwined. If it had not been for that day—and a certain lovely purple aster beckoning from beyond the cliff—why, perhaps Emily and Dean would never have met and Stella might not have existed at all! The thought filled Emily mostly with sorrow—but also with a queer little exhiliarated feeling. Which was not to say that she did not love her daughter—but that, at the age of thirty-eight, Emily Starr Priest's life was nothing like what she had expected.

"All right," she said—only a little unwillingly—and they set off.

They ate their supper at the edge of the cliffs, looking out into the golden sky, which were beginning to be only a little diminished by the stormclouds in the opposite direction. Stella had brought her sketchbook and she leafed through it, showing her mother what she had been working on. Emily marveled at a sketch of Aunt Elizabeth—it was Aunt Elizabeth to the life—a portrait of Cousin Jimmy, sitting in the garden in the evening gloom, looking like a character out of some witchy fairy-tale—Ilse, a bird of paradise in her new feathered hat—Perry wearing his overalls, like any other farmer, holding Millie on his lap. How strange, she thought, as she observed her daughter's skill, that Stella should have been so talented in drawing. There had never been anyone in the Murrays or Priests who had been able to draw more than a straight line—not since Emily had penned a sketch of the Scobie cottage in her sleep—but that gift had been an otherworldly one, and she did not like to think too much about it.

Besides a lot of flesh and blood people, there were a lot of Dream People in Stella's sketchbook—people she had never seen or heard about but would _like_ to see—people she thought up in her mind, a tall, ethereal woman with a little dumpling baby at her breast—two lovers walking by the edge of a dark, shining water, hand in hand—a tall, straight-up-and-down lady with her roly-poly spouse at her elbow. Emily marveled at them and could not stop herself from whirling up stories for each scene—tragic histories—funny anecdotes—the woman with the baby had lost her husband in a seafaring accident, the old mismatched couple had married long ago for love but had not spoken in thirty years—and nobody knew why—couldn't figure it out. The lovers had been separated by a tragic fate and were only now reuniting after many moons apart. Why did she do this? Dean had always said it was a childish thing and she would grow out of it—but Emily was not so sure anymore.

A few fat droplets of rain spattered the page, bringing her out of her reverie. Emily looked up at the sky, which rumbled threateningly. The golden clouds were far out over the bay now—getting farther by the second. There was a flash of lightning.

The storm was imminent and Emily realized they were much closer to Priest Pond than the Blair Water—and that if they did not move fast, they would be stuck in the storm. That meant only one thing—that she would have to go to a place she had not really wanted to ever go again—but she looked at Stella, whose eyes were black with fear. Emily tamped down her resentful feelings and grabbed the girl by the hand.

"Let's run," she said—and they did, all the way to Wyther Grange.

The Grange—ancestral home of the Priests—had not been used in many years, and had a dark, closed-up look about it, but when Emily knocked, the door was so promptly opened that she gasped. She had not forgotten the old black magic feeling she had always had in that house—witchy Caroline and tart, sour old Nancy. But Aunt Nancy had been dead for nearly twenty years and Caroline for over ten. The face at the door belonged to neither of them, but rather to a wholesome-looking, freckled faced boy, twelve or thirteen years of age. His shocking red hair was a bring spot in the long, cool room.

"Come in—come in," he said, as though he had been waiting for them. He opened the door wider and Emily and Stella stepped in just as the storm broke. Sheets of rain began to pour down and the boy closed the door firmly and went around the parlour, checking the windows.

"Who are you?" Emily wondered.

The boy waited until he had battened down all the hatches before coming back and introducing himself. "Why, I'm Jack Kelly," he said. "My father is caretaker here—but he's away now."

"Jack Kelly!" Emily breathed. "Why, I wonder if you are any relation to old _Jock _Kelly. I knew him, once."

"My grandfather," the boy said briefly. He was busy throwing back the white sheets covering the sofa so that his guests may sit down.

"A grandson of Jock Kelly, living at Priest Pond!" Emily laughed. "Your grandfather told me once not to marry a Priest," she explained.

Jack's eyes roamed her up and down, saw her tired mouth and the shadows under her eyes. "I think you didn't listen to him, lady," he said plainly.

Emily said nothing, but Stella bristled.

"There's nothing wrong with marrying a Priest," she said hotly to the little imp of the boy, who was now starting a fire in the grate. "I'm a Priest myself. Dean Priest was my father, and he was a wonderful, WONDERFUL man!"

Jack Kelly watched her for a long moment. "I didn't mean to offend," he said. What a strange way he had of slurring his vowels—as though a little of his grandfather remained in him. "I've never met any Priests before—I only know what I've heard. _You_ don't seem very bad—but there's something about you that makes me pity your husband a little. He'll not be able to lead you around by the nose."

"That's for sure," Stella said passionately.

Jack had gotten the fire going and he sat back on his heels. "If your father was Dean Priest, this house belongs to you, really."

Stella looked to her mother for confirmation. Emily nodded and Stella felt her chest expand in a queer way. She—she had a _house_? She had never known it before. Father had never mentioned it.

"Maybe I'll marry you one day," said Jack Kelly, contemplatively. "You see, I've no high opinion of the Priests—but I love Wyther Grange. I've lived here all my life—can't imagine living anywhere else."

"I wouldn't marry someone who only liked me for my _house_," Stella flamed.

"There are other good points about you," said Jack appreciatively. "Come—let me show you your house, Miss Priest."

Emily and Stella followed him from room to room. Jack was acquainted with everything. Stella had to admit he was very knowledgeable—and it _was_ an interesting place. Not half so homey as New Moon—but it had an _air _to it. She liked nearly everything about it except for a black snake coiled in a jar in the library-room. And still, the snake fascinated her

As they walked, Emily peppered Jack's explanations with anecdotes of her own.

"Here is the Pink Room, where I passed the longest night of my life," she laughed, in one of the bedrooms—which wasn't pink anymore, but papered in wild, writhing violets. "_This_ is where I heard Aunt Nancy and Caroline talking about Ilse's mother—here is where I broke the Jacobite glass—oh, I'll never forget how it _shivered_ into fragments. I thought I was done for. And Aunt Nancy didn't even care! There is the row of French novels that I was not allowed to read—I think I _will_ come back and read them sometime, as homage to my old self, who wanted to so badly."

In the little back parlour, down the long hallway from the kitchen, she stopped by the mantle. "Here is the very spot where Dean and I were married," she said, more to herself than to Stella, who was watching her mother with wide eyes. Mother's voice sounded so strange—and Stella could only suppose that her mother missed father very much.

It had stopped raining by now and so they followed Jack Kelly out into the garden, which was spangled with droplets and little rainbows shimmering everywhere. They passed another hour or two together, talking, until Jack Kelly, Senior, came home, and rather ruined there fun. _He_ recognized Emily straight off—and was eager to let her know that the house that was technically hers now was being well-cared for. Some of the magic went out of the day. Mother was lost in thought. Stella wanted badly to draw the back garden but felt she could not with Young Jack looking over her shoulder. They took their leave as soon as they could.

"You _will_ come back, won't you?" asked Jack the younger, anxiously.

"Of course I will," said Stella. "And," she went on, magnanimously, "You can come and play with me and Millie at New Moon sometime—if you'd like."

"Of course I'm going to come play with you," said Jack scornfully. "You're to be my wife, one day. I'm going to keep a close eye on you and train you up, right."

Stella thought that she rather liked the idea of having the issue of husband sewn up at so young an age. She was not sure she liked Jack very much but he was interesting, and at least she would never be an old maid. Mother was very quiet on the walk home, but burst into peals of laughter, when Stella informed Aunt Elizabeth very calmly over dinner that she was engaged to Jack Kelly—Old Jock Kelly's grandson.

Aunt Elizabeth turned very gray and Mother laughed and laughed. Elizabeth Murray felt ashamed of her reaction—things like who one's grandfather was were not supposed to matter as much these days as they had in auld lang syne. All the same, when she was washing the dishes that night, Stella thought she heard Aunt Elizabeth murmur to Aunt Laura,

"It's the Priest in her—the Priest—a Murray would never have such low taste."

Aunt Laura only smiled and said what Stella had said to Millie a few days before. Stella was young. There was still a lot of time before they had to think of that, and besides: people _had_ been known to change.

"Not Murrays," said Aunt Elizabeth darkly—for there was no denying that Emily's girl was Murray enough for all that.


	9. Come a Foe, Comes a Friend

Jack Kelly kept his word and visited often—so often that Aunt Ilse started referring to them as "you three" when once it had been "you two

Jack Kelly kept his word and visited often—so often that Aunt Ilse started referring to them as "you three" when once it had been "you two." "What are you three monkeys going to do today?" she would ask. And when they had been caught sliding down the banister at New Moon one rainy day, even Aunt Elizabeth had taken up the battle cry: "You three are the wildest bunch of children I ever encountered."

Stella wanted to be pleased that Millie and Jack liked each other so much, but she couldn't quite manage it. It _did_ rankle when Jack had his first taste of Millie's blueberry cobbler and remarked that perhaps he _wouldn't_ be so quick to marry Stella, after all. Not because Stella had any especially tender feelings toward Jack—but because of the admiring way he looked at Millie when he said it. She was petulant for the rest of the day and could not enjoy herself as they built a shining city for mice-people in the Burnley hay-loft. Oh! Millie was _her_ friend—_must_ be only her friend—she did not want to share her with anyone. She wanted Millie to love her best of all, and no one besides. A strange jealousy she had never felt before washed over her, hot and choking and for a few days she hated Jack—_hated_ him—wished she had never met him—wished he had never been born.

"I don't _like_ feeling this way," she thought as she lay resentfully awake in the night. But she could not help it. She _did_ feel that way. Oh, if only Jack would go away! She could not sleep until she had gotten up and drawn a portrait of him, with boils all over his face in place of his freckles—with horribly distorted features and large, wing-like ears—Jack's ears _were_ a little large. But the picture did not make her feel better—she felt worse—and crept down and fed it to the fire.

She was a very unhappy girl until the occasion of Millie and Jack's first fight.

Millie had not inherited her mother's talent for arguing, but when her 'Irish'—as Uncle Perry called it—was up, she could be just as cutting as Aunt Ilse in one of her rages. The fight happened one day because Jack had remarked that Millie's lemon meringue pie was not tart-enough. His mother, Jack said, _knew_ how to make lemon-cake—Jack would bring Millie her recipe. He meant it to be kind, but Millie had spent four of her eleven years cultivating her own recipe, and thought it pretty close to perfection. Her Burnley blood boiled in her veins. She did not cry or shout, but she _did_ pick up the besmirched lemon meringue pie and heft it directly onto Jack Kelly's freckled face.

"Go home and don't _ever_ come back," she said, as he scooped pie filling out of his eyes and blinked at her warily.

He went—and Stella felt _free_ for the first time in days—she had Millie all to herself again, darling, dear, sweet Friend Millie. But…she hated to admit it, but…she had grown so used to having Jack around that now things seemed a little flat. Her Murray pride would not allow her to phone over to the Grange and ask for Jack to come back. Neither would Millie lower herself.

"We'll just have to wait for him to come back on his own," she said firmly, and the girls passed a very boring week together—a week in which everything seemed lopsidedly out of sorts. Once or twice they enlisted Pierrot for a playmate, but he was working through a set of calculus problems that his teacher had given him over summer term for extra credit, and his mind was on them, even when he was building sand-palaces on the shore. After a while they left him to his work, and tried to find the rhythm in "you two" again.

"_I _know what we'll do!" Millie cried one placid, stifling afternoon. "We'll go and visit the Famous ArtistI told you about, and show him your portraits. _That_ will be exciting, and we don't need Jack Kelly to do it!"

Stella was in raptures at the idea. A Famous Artist—whose pictures hung in museums in Charlottetown, Boston and even as far away as the Royal Gallery in London—was something she had never encountered before. She spent a day assembling her portfolio in a large beaten leather folder that Uncle Perry had given her. It was an agonizing process. _Which_ were the best—and which to leave out? For the first time, Stella scrutinized her drawings with an outsider's eye. To her surprise, some of the ones she had liked the most she now felt very amateur—and very stupid. With Millie's help, she finally got together ten of the best, and the girls set off—the portfolio safely tucked inside the basket with Millie's blueberry cobbler.

"Even artists have to eat," she declared, as the girls walked along the shore road.

It was a long walk to the Famous Artist's little cottage down by the Blair Water—they really should have taken the car, but neither girl could bring herself to enlist any adult's help. They had the feeling that this visit should be undertaken solely on their own. Stella thrilled as she imagined how it might go. Surely the Famous Artist would pour over her works, pausing here and there to exclaim, "Marvelous!" or "Wonderful." She would accept the Artist's compliments with modesty and casual remarks that 'it really isn't anything _very_ good.' But they would both know that it was.

After a while they reached the cottage—a little white cottage set close against a hill. It was not, Stella thought, a very picturesque place for an Artist of such renown to live. The yard was very bare and swept and almost _too_ neat. There was a prim row of dogwood trees, carefully pruned, and pansies planted in strict rows of three going up the walk. _This_ was an Artist's house? No—no—there was nothing of the jungle about it—nothing a little wild and untamed—nothing even very interesting.

And certainly nothing beautiful.

While they had walked Millie had told Stella a little about the Artist. He was from Montreal and spent his summers on the Island. He was rumored to be very tempermental, and never went to church. Stella had envisioned a tall, thin, aesthetic man, with a little beard that covered just the tip of his chin and perhaps a beret on top of his shaggy locks.

So she was very surprised when the door was opened by a very large, fat man, with close-clipped white hair and matching beard.

"He looks wholesome—like Santa Claus!" she thought, a little disappointedly.

The artist's expression did not look like Santa Claus—he looked very annoyed at finding himself confronted by two tiny she-things—that is, until the girls explained their mission. _Then_ they were flattering enough that his face creased into a broad, self-satisfied smile.

"Of course I'd be happy to show you the work of the great Maurice Hayward." Stella was confused until she realized that the Artist was referring to herself. A flicker of disgust went through her. A _truly_ great artist would never refer to himself as 'great'—Stella knew that—there was too much self-doubt involved, and an intelligent artist always was looking for things she could do differently.

"What did you say your names were again?" asked The Artist—or, as Stella was coming to think of him—the _great_ (with sarcastic emphasis) Maurice Hayward. "Stella Priest—hm—odd name—and Miller, you say? Any relation to Perry Miller? Your father? _Oh." _

The Great Maurice Hayward's 'oh' was very eloquent. The girls saw him draw in his stomach and rearrange his shirt cuffs self-importantly. They exchanged very eloquent looks.

Up and up the stairs they went, to Maurice Hayward's studio. He threw the door open with a little fanfare and showed his paintings one by one. The were mostly sea-scapes, and—Stella had to admit—pretty. But they were _snapshots_, not windows into the _soul_ of things. There was no sense of atmosphere and mood. It appeared that it was always high noon at the seashore as far as Maurice Hayward was concerned.

"How much nicer this would be if there was some shadows," she thought to herself, as she studied a painting of the sea breaking on the Malvern Rocks. "Then there would be some mystery—some allure—some…_something_."

To Mr. Hayward she said, "Lovely!"

"Lovely," Millie echoed faintly.

"_This _is a portrait of Mrs. Roger Samuels with her little girl," said Mr. Hayward, proudly displaying a rather flat-faced woman with her little baby on her knee. The baby's arms were a trifle too long, making him apeish-looking. And Mrs. Samuel's eyes were unfocused—even a little crossed.

"_You_ don't like women," Stella thought, as she regarded it. "Mrs. Samuels looks terribly plain—and there is always something beautiful in a mother."

But she said, "Gorgeous!"

"Gorgeous," Millie parroted, in a dubious tone of voice.

Maurice Hayward took the girls through the rest of his paintings in great detail. It seemed as though they were in the sweltering studios for hours. Stella thought a great many things that she dared not say, and had completely run out of admiring words when Mr. Hayward led them back downstairs and finally—_finally_—said he might take a quick—very quick—look at Stella's work. At this point, Stella desired nothing more than to go home, but could not find a way to extract herself without seeming very rude.

She opened her portfolio with grim determination.

Mr. Hayward made the most cursory flicker through the drawings there. "Hm," he sniffed, looking at a delicate watercolor of sunset in the old New Moon orchard. "Insipid," he declared, throwing it aside.

"Oh, I _am_ sorry it is not a seashore," thought Stella, mockingly.

Mr. Hayward similarly dismissed a line drawing of Aunt Laura, sitting in her chair, her eyes blue and lively, her hands working at her crochet. "A poor imitation of Mary Cassat," he sniffed.

_Thought_ Stella: "I am surprised _you_ even know who _she_ is."

Of a portrait of Aunt Elizabeth, Mr. Hayward remarked, patronizingly, "You see, child, nobody wants to look at pictures of _old people_. It is too depressing. No masterpiece has ever been painted of a gray-haired old woman in a cap."

"It does not surprise me that you never seemed to have heard of Whistler's mother," said Stella to herself.

Mr. Hayward had reached the last painting in the bunch, a whimsical sketch of New Moon with the pearly dawn behind it. He took off his glasses and peered at it closely. He held it away at arm's length and brought it toward him again. He looked at it for so long that Stella began to think, ridiculously, that he would say he liked it.

Mr. Hayward looked fiercely at her.

"You copied this from somewhere," he said, finally. "There is no way a child could have drawn something like this. What a little plagiarist you are!"

"I'm not!" cried Stella, jumping to her feet. "_You're_ the one who couldn't—couldn't ever—you—you…!" Her words failed her in her fury. Millie was tugging at her hand.

There was a voice from somewhere behind her. "Is there a problem, Maurice?"

Stella turned and saw silhouetted in the doorway a handsome, dark-haired man—with, she noticed, brilliantly blue eyes—even more brilliant and blue than Aunt Laura's. He was perhaps forty years—maybe older—maybe younger—and Stella could tell with her artist's perception from looking at his face—with one glance—that this interloper thought even less of the _great_ Mr. Hayward than Stella did. He flashed her a glance that said, _sit still and let me handle this_. And then he seemed to do a double-take, and looked at her more closely. His eyes roamed Stella's face, and looked her up and down. And then the man turned quite pale, though she could not imagine why.

"Nothing is wrong, Frederick," said Mr. Hayward, pushing Stella's drawings roughly aside. "This little girl here has imposed upon me to show me her _drawings—_" he sniffed, "And has gotten into a most unbecoming snit when I offered her some perfectly gentle criticism. That's all. I suppose you've come for the paints I borrowed yesterday—they are upstairs. I will go and get them."

Stella would not let him off so easily.

"_He_ said I copied this drawing and I _didn't_," she intoned, her eyes aflame in her thin face. "I didn't—I never would dream of passing off someone else's work as my own."

"Dosh!" said Mr. Hayward. "It is exactly like a sketch of a little cottage on Cape Cod that I saw published in a magazine last summer. Never mind, run along home."

The man stepped into the room and said, "Wait, Maurice." And then to Stella, "_I'd_ like to see your drawing, if you don't mind. I am an artist, too, you see, and I never pass up an opportunity to scrutinize my competition."

Stella handed it over, and the man—Frederick—looked at it for a long time. So long that Stella's anger quite drained away. She sat limply down next to Millie and tucked her hand in Millie's own, and watched Mr. Frederick watch her picture.

Finally he said, "I know this house. I've seen it before. She did not copy it. I feel reasonably sure of that." To Stella he said, "How came you to choose this subject?"

"I _live_ there—at New Moon," Stella said. "I'm Stella Priest."

Mr. Frederick's eyes were hard on her face again. "Yes," he said softly, after a moment. "I do believe you are." He sounded very queer—almost sad to hear it.

Mr. Hayward had gone away and returned with the borrowed paints, which he held out to the other man very coldly. He did not like being contradicted by a fellow _artiste_—especially before such an ignorant, vain little child. If Mr. Frederick noticed, he did not seem to care. He took the paints but ignored Mr. Hayward. He said to Stella and Millie, "Come, girls." The three of them trooped outside with their heads held high.

A little ways down the road, Millie exploded. "_Horrid_ man!" she cried. "Puffed up like a poisoned pup!"

"Indubitably," smiled their new friend—smiled with his lips, and somewhat with their eyes, though something in them was still a little closed-off. It was as if there was a room inside his head that was barred and locked in a way that made Stella think of the little, closed-up house she had seen with Pierrot.

"He didn't even want any cobbler," Millie protested.

"I do," said Mr. Frederick. "I love a good cobbler. _Is_ it good?"

"Yes," said Millie, without any hint of vanity. "I'm a swell cook."

The man seemed to see Millie for the first time. "Is that so?" he laughed. And then he said something very perplexing,

"It is a little like drawing a veil aside and stepping into the past. I wonder if a ragged urchin of a boy will come crashing through the trees to join us—and I will look into that little pool over there and see myself at thirteen again—and then we four will be together—together—as we once were, and as we still should be."

Stella looked at Millie. Millie shrugged her shoulders.

Mr. Frederick had intercepted their glance and he slipped out of his reverie. They ate Millie's cobbler by the little pond and as they munched, Mr. Frederick went through Stella's portfolio.

"A wonderful expression of light and shadow," he said, of the sunset garden drawing. Of Aunt Laura he said, "You have managed to capture something of her sweetness without it being too saccharine." Of Aunt Elizabeth: "This would be a terribly dour picture if you had not managed to show the spirit in her eyes. You don't show hands, which means you can't do them, but you are young, and you _can_ do eyes—remarkably well. A little of the soul shines through them."

"Thank you," Stella said, surprised at this straightforward response.

Mr. Frederick had turned to another picture—Mother, dreaming away in the kitchen, her chin in her hand. Her eyes were large and limpid and her mouth quirked in the bare beginning of a smile. "I have seen her so," murmured Mr. Frederick to himself. "In her wonder-moments." To Stella he said, "I don't suppose you would let me have this picture."

Stella was torn. She _wanted_ to let him have it—but all the same, it was one of her best portraits and she had not even shown it to Mother yet. Mr. Frederick noticed her hesitation and put it back without pressing the issue. They ate their cobbler in silence, and then he walked the girls part of the way home.

When the path forked he took the right and they were going left. "So, we're parting," he said, and he smiled at them again. "I wonder…" he trailed off and then said, with firmness,

"I wonder if you—both—would come and visit me sometime? I don't live far—just a ways up this road."

"We'd love to," said Stella. She smiled at him, and there was something in her smile. Mr. Frederick's smile dimmed a bit and his eyes were very far away.

"Goodbye—for now," he said. "I shall hope to see you—you will always be welcome in my house. It is the little white clapboarded house on the hill. It is called the Tansy Patch."

"We won't say goodbye," Stella said certainly. "Because we _will_ see you soon." She and Millie watched him go. At the bend in the road, he turned back, and waved. And then Mr. Frederick was gone.


	10. The Truth Will Set You Free

Millie went once with Stella to the Tansy Patch, but after the first visit, she would not go again. "It's _boring_ there," she sighed. "I don't care a whit about drawing or painting and it's all you and Mr. Frederick talk about. And it's strange—the way he looks at you. It gives me shivers. Stella, I think Mr. Frederick likes you very much—but under that, I think he _doesn't_ like you in a way—or else he re-re-resentients you. I don't know why he would, but he does."

Stella bristled at this slander of her new friend. For she and Mr. Frederick were getting to be fast friends—she found an excuse to go over to the Tansy Patch (which was _exactly_ what an artist's house _should_ look like) nearly every day. Mr. Frederick had loaned her books and yesterday he had presented her with a set of oil paints of her very own. He had built a long white verandah onto the back of his house, looking out toward the sea, and every afternoon he and Stella took their easels out and painted there, companionably. Stella was translating the sketch of Mother in the kitchen into oils, and Mr. Frederick was working on an abstract of the sunrise. It was nothing like the sunrise—only great swaths of color—no sea or sand or boats or sky—but at the same time, when you looked at it, there was no denying that it _was_ a sunrise—or at least, the _spirit_ of the sunrise.

It was a _nice_ friendship, but all the same, it was not an entirely comfortable one. For the first thing, it must be kept secret. Aunt Elizabeth had learned of the girls' visit to the _great_ Maurice Hayward and she had almost had, as Millie would have put it, a coronary. Over the years Elizabeth Murray had resigned herself to the fact that her niece _must_ be a writer—but her grand-niece did not _have_ to be an artist. Why, artists were even more scandalous than writers! They lived in Paris, wore eccentric clothes, and then there _were_ the question of the—the—unclothed subjects of paintings. (Aunt Elizabeth could not even bring herself to say the word 'nudes.') And most paintings didn't look like anything nowadays—just a lot of little shapes and blocks and cubes and stripes and Lord-knows-what-else. _And_ that Van Gogh fellow had cut off his ear.

So Stella kept her visits to Mr. Frederick secret. She did not lie, exactly—she just let everyone believe that she played at the Burnley House with Millie in the afternoons. If Dean Priest had taken his daughter more frequently to the Catholic churches on the Continent she might have heard the term 'lie of omission,' but he hadn't and so Stella's conscience did not trouble her very much at all.

Secondly, Mr. Frederick often said disagreeable things about Stella's paintings. Oh, he was very complimentary—but he had a habit of zooming in on the things that even _she_ knew were not as good as they should be. "You are going to have to learn to draw hands sometime," he said, his brows lowered over his blue eyes. "This is getting ridiculous, Stella. I think you'll find that very few people go through life with their hands tucked neatly behind their backs, out of sight. You can show a lot in hands—a restless tension—a languid peace—the power a beautiful hand is not to be underestimated."

So Stella began showing hands in her work. At which Mr. Frederick exclaimed, "Lord, I said _hands, _not catcher's mitts!"

It was very hard to please him, Stella thought, but worth it when she managed it. "You don't have any problem with elbows," said Mr. Frederick gruffly, and Stella lived on the compliment for days.

And then—last of all—she had to admit that Millie was a _little_ right. Not that Mr. Frederick was _resentful_ toward her, but that sometimes, when she happened to look up, she caught his eyes on her, and something in them was a little sad. Stella thought that perhaps there was a tragedy in his life to make him look at her that way; perhaps he had lost a little child of his own, and that was why he was so kind to her. She asked him about it, once—if he had any children. It seemed that he should, if he didn't. What a jolly type of father he would make!

"No children," said Mr. Frederick, briefly. "Except the pictures of the ones I carry around in my head with me. They look very much like you—except that their mouths point up, not down, at the corners."

Mr. Frederick's own mouth pointed up at the corners.

Stella could not fathom what he meant.

xxxxxxxxxx

On the days that she _didn't_ go to see Mr. Frederick, Pierrot read to them in the afternoons. They had worked their way through _Alice_, which Stella had read before, and _Treasure Island_, which she had not. She adored it so much that she began a series of sketches titled 'Adventure on the High Seas.' She kept them secret, so that nobody could see that the fiercest pirate of all was a tall, dark man with stubble peppering his cheeks, and one—the other was hidden behind a patch—very blue eye. His minions included a red-haired, freckled boy-pirate with a peg-leg—another with blond curls and very unpirateish glasses—and two piratettes with their hair kilted up under bright handkerchiefs. She lobbied for their next book to be something _just_ as swashbuckling.

But Millie put her foot down. Her feminine little spirit had wilted under all the swabbing of decks and hunting for lost booty. She wanted something sweet—_A Little Princess_, or _The Secret Garden_—books that Stella thought insipid. Besides—she did not think she would like very much to hear a story about girls who had lost their fathers—her own loss was too raw for that.

Pierrot had the perfect solution. An old favorite—mellow and beautiful—but still funny, and full of the right amount of adventure, and character. He brought the beaten-up copy down to the orchard the next day and the four young people—Jack Kelly had decided to come back—spent the day in the _Applegath_ garden, with the scent and magic of _Peggy Applegath's_ roses.

"I love this book," said Stella, at the end of the fifth chapter. "_The Moral of the Rose_—it is the perfect title. You _can_ learn something from a rose, I think. From anything beautiful, really. Oh, Pierrot, won't you let me take the book home overnight? I promise I won't read ahead—but I'd like to show it to Mother. I think she would enjoy it."

Millie started, and darted a glance at her brother. He blinked back, amazedly. He had never supposed the Stella did not know—he had just assumed that she had read it before—he thought her sighs and exclamations were over old familiar, beloved passages.

"Stella," he said, a little oddly. "Aunt Emily…your mother…"

"Your mother _wrote this book_," piped up Millie in a shrill voice. Her eyes were very wide.

"_My_ mother!" Stella laughed. "Oh, what a joke! You're teasing me. If my mother had written a book—this book—I surely would have known." But when she laughed again, it was not as bright.

Pierrot handed her the book and there it was: the title, in gold letters and inch high. THE MORAL OF THE ROSE. And under that, _by E.B. Starr. _

"What?" Stella quavered. "What—how?"

No one seemed to know what to say.

"Mother never said." Stella's voice was small. "She never said—that she'd written a book. She—she's written some lovely fairy-tales for me—but I just supposed it a—a hobby of sorts, a little like crochet. I—I wonder why she never mentioned it." She kept looking down at the cover, as though the next time she looked, it would not be there, but it was. _E.B. Starr, _for Emily Byrd Starr; Starr had been mother's maiden name. It was why Stella was called Stella. "I wonder why she would keep such a secret—from _me._"

Pierrot put his arm around her thin, shaking shoulders.

"Ask her," he said, wisely. "Let her explain."

xxxxxxxxxx

Stella was very quiet all through dinner. So quiet that Emily wondered if something wasn't wrong with the child. Usually Stella was full of chatter. Could it be that she was sick—a summer cold? Her cheeks were very flushed—heat stroke? She wanted to ask, but whenever she opened her mouth Stella glared across the table at her, a little accusingly.

Aunt Elizabeth noticed it and said, "That is very impolite."

"So is keeping secrets," muttered Stella.

"Dear?" blinked Aunt Laura, her eyes large and confused. None of them were used to Stella talking back.

"I think I'll go up to my room." Stella rose, stiffly. "I'm not very hungry, it seems."

Emily paced in the parlour until she could not take it any longer. She felt sure her daughter's remark had been directed at her. Could it be that Stella had—had overheard—something? Something about—well, anything? She remembered well the way she had felt when she had heard Aunt Nancy and Caroline Priest talking about Ilse's mother. Blair Water might have changed a lot since those days but gossips never changed at all. She wondered if the girl might have heard something—something.

Emily could take it no longer. She climbed the stairs to Stella's room.

She did not have to wait long to find out what the matter was. Stella was sitting up in bed, and when Emily opened the door she held up the book—the green-covered book—Emily knew it right away for what it was. _Her_ book—her darling book. Oh, she remembered how proud she had been when she had seen it—her _name_ on it—and the imprint of Wareham's on the back. She had thought, with a youthful delight, that it would be the first in a long and illustrious career. Instead, it had been the only. Emily sat down hard in the chair by the window and eased the door closed with her foot. She pressed her hands against her burning eyes.

"Why, Mother?" asked Stella, beseechingly. "Why did you never tell me?"

Emily's thoughts whirled around in her head and her heart beat painfully in her chest. How could she explain to the girl? She decided to make her voice very light, and urged a smile to come to her face. She _almost_ managed it.

"So you've discovered my secret," she said, almost teasingly. "My little youthful indiscretion—my 'book.'" The quotations in her voice were evident.

"_Don't_," said Stella unsmilingly. "Don't pooh-pooh this, Mother. _You_ aren't Aunt Elizabeth."

Emily reflected that was true. She grinned, despite herself—and the strange coolness between mother and child was broken. Emily decided she would tell the truth, instead—or at least, something like the truth.

"I was a writer," Emily said, folding her hands over her knees. "I wrote that book when I was twenty-three—it was published when I was twenty-four." In the flickering candlelight she _looked_ like the girl she had been. "But it wasn't my first endeavor, Stella—I'd been writing my whole life. Since I was your age—before. It was my 'Alpine Path'—you remember, the poem I taught you…"

_The Alpine Path—so hard, so steep_

_That leads to heights sublime_,

Stella quoted.

"Exactly," Emily murmured. "Just as your art is, to you. Oh, darling girl, I shall never forget the day I held that book in my hands for the first time. I felt the Alpine Path was mine that day. But I never consider that, once having climbed it, I would have to find a way to stay there, at the summit—to establish it as my own. It slipped away from me, Stella, and I found myself at the base of the hill looking up, again—as though it had never been climbed at all."

Stella's hand found her mother's and covered. "What happened?" she wondered.

Emily regarded her daughter and wondered how much she should tell her. Stella was eleven—but it was an _old-soul_ eleven—she could understand things most children couldn't. All the same, she was young—and she had adored her father so entirely. Once again Emily decided she would tell the truth—but it would only be a _version_ of the truth. She could not hurt her daughter anymore than she had been hurt already.

"Your father and I were married," she said. "And there wasn't any time, really, to write after that. I was a newly-wed—it wouldn't have been right for me to devote so much time to my work, when your father needed me—wanted me—to be with him. _He_ was not like us, Stella, in that way—I don't think he understood the need to create, the desire to work—and I think he was a _little_ jealous," she tempered, gently.

"And then came the war. It was even harder to find the time to write anything. The war seemed so close to us. I remember going out and looking down the mountain at the first battles of Isonzo, and the things I saw there could not be translated into any human language. The war lasted for so long, and I think it killed a part of me that believed in hope and good things—for a time. I did write—on the sly—but the things I was writing, scared me.

"And then the war was over," Emily mused, her eyes growing large and far away. "We were all expected to go back to our lives, just like that—but as you may expect, it wasn't as easy as you'd think. That was in '17—and in '18, you came. Oh, it _isn't_ your fault, don't look that way—but a wife—of an invalid—and the mother—even of the sweetest baby—doesn't have much time for anything else. And I'd forgotten, Stella—I'd forgotten my art. Or else it had left me."

"How _horrible_," Stella breathed. It was the first time that she thought of her own talent as a _gift_—she had never considered the idea that one day she might be without it. How would it feel, if it went? Just the thought made her feel strangely empty and bereft.

"You know the rest," Mother said. "Dean's health became poorer with every year—we were always moving, visiting doctors—my editors and publishers had quite forgotten about me—the world wanted a different kind of story, and I didn't know how to write it. _Don't_ look so sad, Elfkin—I don't miss it very much."

"You're lying," Stella pronounced. "Mother—you miss it _very_ much. I can tell."

"You're right," Emily confessed. "I _did_—I _do_. But I _am_ writing again—a very little—just verbal sketches, really. Not finished paintings—nothing like that. But something—perhaps I will find my way back to the foot of the Alpine Path again. And Stella," Emily's voice broke, "I want you to know—that I wouldn't trade the years I spent with you and your father for anything. It might have cost me something—but if I had not lived them, oh—how much I really would have missed!"

Stella threw herself into her mother's arms.

"Oh, it's _nice_ to have anything out in the open," she sighed. "I don't like there to be any secrets between us, Mother dearwums."

She felt her mother stiffen and pull away a little. When Emily spoke again her voice was casual—too casual.

"I don't know," she said. "I think a person must have some secrets from even those they love the best—even if they are as close as you and I—if one wants to call one's soul her own. But no, dear—there isn't anything else—"

She was lying again—or else she was not telling the truth. Stella could see that. But she did not call it out. For she had secrets, too.

After all—_she_ had not told Mother about Mr. Frederick.


	11. As Chance Would Have It

Stella was growing at an alarming rate

Stella was growing at an alarming rate. For a while it had seemed that she would be 'Priest'—none of the Priests were very tall—but in the month since she had been at New Moon she had shot up, all at once, all arms and long, coltish legs. Her dresses (even Emily admitted) were getting indecently short.

"I suppose we'll have to take you into town and get you some new things," she decided, looking at her daughter ruefully. How could it be that the darling, dimpled baby of yesterday was now this nearly-grown up girl of eleven? She felt a pang for the passage of time. She wished Dean could see the girl. Something about the moment made Emily think of her long dead little mother. Juliet had never gotten to see her daughter grow up.

"Each day is a blessing," Emily thought to herself, and for the first time since she had entered widowhood, she had something like 'the flash.'

They spent the day shopping, and bought several serviceable new dresses and one that was the exact opposite of serviceable—one really couldn't imagine wearing it _anywhere_. But it _had_ to be bought. Emily and Stella both agreed. It cost an inordinate amount, and both of them worried over what to tell Aunt Elizabeth.

"Let's think about it over ice cream," Emily said.

Stella ate her sundae and considered. "Mother," she began. "I _know_ Murrays aren't supposed to discuss money…"

"Not under _most _circumstances, no."

"But—well, Mother—are we _very_ rich?"

"Why do you ask?"

Stella licked her spoon and confessed, "Millie said the other day that Jack Kelly _only_ wants to marry me for my money. And I said it couldn't be true. We haven't any money to speak of. _I've_ never seen it, if we have."

Emily pressed her lips together so that she would not laugh. "We keep our money in the bank, dear one. That's why you don't see it. As far as the other issue—we will never hurt for money. Your father made sure of that. And _I_ did. I'm proud of my humble contributions to our family funds. My book—_The Moral of the Rose_—was quite popular ten or so years ago. But Stella—we could be positive paupers and we'd still be rich. We have beauty in our lives—and good friends—and family—and _each other_. We will never be anything but rich as long as we have each other."

Stella found it a very satisfactory answer.

They walked home with their parcels along the Blair Water. Occasionally they met someone who did not know that Emily was 'home' again. Stella watched as Mother's face went hard and mask-like every time she explained about 'poor Dean.' The person she was speaking to would cluck, make a _tut-tut_ sound, and inevitably say the wrong thing. "You must have known when you married such _an old man_ that this day would come," said one sweet-faced gray-haired old lady. Emily's mouth quirked at the corner's and she said that really, she'd had other things on her mind than _that_.

They all wanted to see Stella. Not just _see_ her—peer at her, sometimes up close, sometimes behind the safety of a pair of spectacles. "Nothing like her father—A Priest to the life, no Murray about her!—Looks all right around the erm, shoulders—Awfully tall for a little girl—A bit short, really." The only thing that anyone seemed to agree on was that she was _such_ a grumpy-looking girl. Why didn't she smile.

"I _save_ my smiles for _important_ occasions," Stella said indignantly. "I don't go around tossing them off willy-nilly."

One woman said, "Emily—do you ever regret what happened between you and—"

"Not at all," Emily said in a hard, quick voice.

They were almost to the Today Road (now paved and renamed State Street—"an atrocity," Emily had muttered when she saw it), when a man's voice cried out from behind:

"Emily! Emily Byrd Starr!"

"Oh, no," Emily said, turning reluctantly, a grim smile already tacked onto her lips.

The man had dark hair—was lean and long—vivid eyes—he ran up and not shook Emily's hand but enveloped her into a large hug. ("Oof," said Emily, reeling). After the embrace he _did_ pump her hand, up and down, for what seemed like years. "Never thought to see you around the old place again!" he cried. "Good that you're back—wasn't the same about you."

"Yes," Emily said, and Stella could see that her mind was spinning—that Mother _didn't remember the man_. "Good to see you, too," she said.

"And this must be your girl—delighted to meet you. I'm Gus Rankin—"

"Gus _Rankin_!" Emily cried. "_Gus_ Rankin? Oh, I didn't recognize you! You look so—so—well…"

"Happy?" Gus Rankin asked. "It's because I _am_, Emily dear." Turning to Stella he said, apologetically,

"You see, I was rather a serious man when your mother knew me. I liked to believe I was lofty high-above all this _fun_ nonsense. But then I realized that I wasn't _not_ choosing fun—fun was not choosing _me_. Why, I didn't know _how_ to have fun. I wouldn't have known a good time if it had jumped up and bit me on the nose."

"How did you find out what it was, then?" Stella wanted to know.

"Liquor," said Mr. Rankin seriously.

Emily looked startled. "Really?"

Mr. Rankin nodded. Emily surprised herself—and Stella—by throwing her head back and laughing long and hard.

"You see," Mr. Rankin told them, when the bout had passed. "I didn't set out to get drunk. It happened by accident. I was at one of Alice Chidlaw's parties and somebody spiked the punch. Well, my car broke down on the road and I was pretty hot and thirsty by the time I got there. I drank eight glassfuls down with dinner—and when it was time for dancing I could hardly stand. But how _wonderful _I felt! Such a weight lifted. I guess you could say it was a bit of a conversion. Never touched the stuff again," he added quickly. "But I found that night I _could_ have fun, and I haven't stopped since. Say, Emily—it was at one of Mrs. Childlaw's parties that we last met, wasn't it? You wore a green dress—green or blue—I remember that I couldn't take my eyes off you all night."

"I really don't recall," said Emily, in an offhand way. "This is my daughter, Stella Priest, who is eleven years old, and might look Murray but might also resemble her father's people, who _may_ be too short, but is also possibly too tall."

"Pleasure to meet you," Mr. Rankin said to Stella. "You look just about right to me, kiddo. You folks headed to New Moon? I'll walk with you—give me those packages."

Emily held them back. "You may walk with us under one condition," she said. "You mustn't ask me anything about my husband, or his demise, or my marriage, or what I thought when I married _such an old man_. I couldn't bear it if you did, I'd slap you silly."

"I wouldn't dream of asking you anything of the sort," Gus Rankin said, offended. Emily handed the packages and they began to walk.

"You're _really_ not going to ask me _anything_?" Emily persisted, as they went along.

"No," said Gus.

"Well!" said Emily, swinging her hand in Stella's. "That's very good of you, Gus. Very cordial. And restrained."

"Yes," he said. "And besides—I had the whole story from Ilse Miller ages ago."

They were just about to New Moon by then and the folks in the house heard a sound they had not heard in ages—a sound that they had not thought they would hear again. Emily was laughing—laughing long and hard.

"Stay to tea," she told Mr. Rankin.

"Don't mind if I do," he said. "Hello, Miss Murray—Miss Laura."

Stella went upstairs to put her new clothes away and wash her hands. She didn't know why, but for some reason the idea of Mother and Mr. Rankin, laughing together, made her prickly with something hot and mean feeling. She did not know why it would be so.

"He isn't as fun or funny as he thinks," she told Stella-in-the-glass. "And he has an overlarge nose!"

Stella-in-the-glass nodded along with Stella-out-of-the-glass. This much they could agree on.


	12. What is Lost

Stella relieved her feelings against Mr

Stella relieved her feelings against Mr. Gus Rankin by painting a very mean—and, it must be said, a very _unfaithful_—portrait of him at the Tansy Patch a week later. It was incredibly unflattering, but it also _was_ Gus Rankin to a T. Stella had never before heard of caricature, but the thing she produced was just that.

Mr. Frederick stood behind her and peered at her work. "Why," he wondered, "Have you artistically slandered my friend Gus in such a way?"

Stella smudged the line of Rankin's bulbous nose and smiled, satisfied. She had given poor Mr. Rankin ears the size of a baboons. "I don't like him," she told Mr. Frederick.

"I can see that," said Mr. Frederick. "But Gus is a good sort—if you don't mind everlasting optimism." He said it in a way that implied he _did_ mind such a thing. "Is there any _particular_ reason you don't like him?"

"Any number of them," Stella said. "But the main reason is that when he came over yesterday he asked Mother if she'd like to go and see a play in town sometime. And mother said yes." _And_ had dropped her lashes in a way that Stella was not entirely comfortable with. But she did not tell Mr. Frederick this part, and she did not have to. She was just about to add a boil to the end of Mr. Rankin's 'overlarge' nose when Mr. Frederick snatched the charcoal from her hand in a smooth gesture.

"Go home," he growled at her. "I'm not in the mood for you today."

Stella stared, open-mouthed, as he went inside without a backward glance. He slammed the door behind him.

xxxxxxxxxx

Stella was angry—angry to the bottom of her proud little heart. When Mr. Frederick sent for her the next day—through Millie—she dressed in her impractical new dress and set out for the Tansy Patch. "To collect my things," she told Mr. Frederick in a haughty way. If she had not left her paints and a half dozen of her best paintings there she would never have gone back, not after the way he had treated her!

Mr. Frederick caught at her at the door. "Wait," he said. "I want you to stay."

"I'm _terribly _busy and I can't," Stella said in a freezing way.

Mr. Frederick _almost_ smiled—if he had smiled Stella would have cast him away forever. But he checked it just in time. He looked apologetic now.

"I was a beast yesterday," he said. "I am very sorry. Sometimes I fly into a mood and can't help myself. It is called an 'artistic temperament—you will learn it, in time."

"Well," Stella said, mollified. "As long as it doesn't happen again."

"I can't promise." Mr. Frederick was grave. "But I shall endeavour to do my best. Now, little Star, here is why I called you up today. I've been commissioned to do a painting—two paintings—a mother and her little girl—not so little. About your age. They're coming to sit for me over the course of the next few weeks and I'd like you to be here, too. I think it would be a good experience and I'd like for you to make sketches—so that I can incorporate them into the finished product. They're paying me a lot of money, and so I want them to be as well-done as possible."

Stella was cool. "What would _my_ fee be?" she asked.

Mr. Frederick sat back and looked at her strangely. And then he laughed. "You little Priest," he said. "I'll give you a dollar a week. No more, no less."

Stella, who had not planned on actually being paid anything held out her hand for him to shake.

She was trembling with excitement as she set up her easel and paints on the verandah. Mr. Frederick had hung a gold curtain and set up a little stool next to a flowering palm. "Now all we need is the subject," he said, "Ah—_here_ she is."

"Not _you_," said Stella—and Flora Norris—in perfect unison. They glared at each other.

"I don't want _her_ here," Flora said to Mr. Frederick, tossing her masses and masses of curls over her shoulder. "Not for my painting."

"She is my apprentice," Mr. Frederick said gravely. "I'm afraid she's part and parcel of the bargain. If you want your picture painted at all, you'll have to make do."

Flora settled herself on the stool with a moue of distaste on her face. ("I am going to paint you _just_ like that," thought Stella gleefully.) She did have a wonder moment when a wayward shaft of sunlight came down and settled itself onto Flora's curls—they flamed suddenly gold, the old, deep gold of ancient coins.

"The _sun_ is _in _my _eyes,_" cried Flora. Stella noticed with delight that her nose was a trifle hawkish.

Flora sat for an hour. By the end of it she was complaining that her legs hurt her, her back was getting stiff, she was bored, bored, bored. "How can anyone with an imagination be bored?" Stella wondered. She added a vacant, stupid shine to Flora's eyes.

Finally Mr. Frederick told her she might go. He had done enough for today.

Stella lingered, cleaning her brushes, arranging her charcoals _very_ precisely—just so that she and Flora would not have to walk part-ways together. She did not want to be alone with Flora. She was afraid—and how her soul hated that, being afraid! But she had not forgotten the day when Flora's face had gone maniacally mean, the bike and the puddle in the road.

Flora lingered, too, poking this and prodding that and asking Mr. Frederick all sorts of silly nonsense questions. What do you use this for? What is that? Have you ever painted—a meaningful toss of curls—anybody _truly_ beautiful?

"Lots of people," said Mr. Frederick. "Everyone is beautiful if you look at them in the right way. Skedaddle, young people, I'm going out for supper and can't be late."

Stella looked at him woefully as he shooed them outdoors. There was no way to avoid Flora now.

They walked in silence for the most part. Stella was so focused on watching Flora—while appearing _not _to watch her—that she was not looking where she was going. She tripped over a tree root and her portfolio, tucked neatly under her arm, went flying. Loose pages scattered in the wind. "Oh!" she cried, and ran after them. A drawing of Millie settled in the mud, a picture of Aunt Laura was borne up into the top of a poplar tree. She ran to and fro, collecting them. At least, she told herself, Flora would be gone by the time she finished.

But Flora was not gone. She was standing rooted into place, holding a sketch of the Malvern Rocks.

"You never drew this yourself," she said, her first words to Stella—directly to Stella—ever. "Mother and I saw this _exact painting_ in the British Museum last year."

Stella snatched it from the tips of her fingers. "I don't believe _you_ saw anything at the British Museum besides the souvenir shop," she said, as nastily as she could.

Flora's face darkened. "I've been to the Louvre in Paris." She pronounced Paris as "Pah-ree."

"Oh, the _Louvre_," Stella said, with a wave of her hand. "Our neighbor, Jean-Claude, was curator there. You haven't lived until you've had the private tour. Mona Lisa by midnight is really a different thing than Mona Lisa by day."

"You Priests think you are above all," Flora cried, her face darkening angrily.

"Not above _all_," said Stella loftily. "There is God to speak of."

She made a great show of arranging her drawings back into her portfolio. When she looked up again Flora was quivering with rage.

"I hope you don't come to Shrewsbury High, _ever_," she said. "I'm the leader, there. I'll make your life miserable."

"I would never go to a school full of people stupid enough to elect _you_ to lead them," Stella said. "Goodbye." And she walked away, her chin raised.

In her room that night she looked over her poor trampled drawings. The one of Millie had been muddied beyond believe. And then her heart seized up painfully, for the picture of Father—her deathbed picture of him—had been torn, very deliberately, down the center. And then again, crossways.

"Oh," Stella breathed, her heart breaking. "Oh, no. Father—no!" And she began to cry.

She hated herself for crying but at the same time she could not keep from it. She cried for a long time. For her lost father, and their lost life together. How many things father would never see! Her first gallery show. Her first review. Her marriage—if she ever did marry—her children—if she ever had any. Oh, life wasn't fair. It was the only picture she had ever had of him, and Flora had torn it. Stella tucked the pieces in the cubbyhole above the fireplace and threw herself on her bed, weeping.

It was not until much later that she noticed her favorite picture of Pierrot Miller was missing, plucked out of the bunch, lost.


	13. The Story of Teddy Kent

Emily and Gus Rankin had seen their play together—and had enjoyed it so much that they decided to go to the opera next

Emily and Gus Rankin had seen their play together—and had enjoyed it so much that they decided to go to the opera next. "Fancy watching Violetta die in Alfredo's arms with Gus Rankin beaming from the seat next to you," Emily laughed, but she really was very excited about it. She had a new dress of silver lace over gold silk that made her look like a sunbeam on a windy grey day. Stella watched her mother dress, half-proud and half-hateful. Why should Mother look so nice for Gus Rankin? She had never wore such a dress for _Father_. Stella was feeling very protective of her father lately. Since Flora had torn his picture, he felt a little _far_ from her.

Mother stepped into high-heeled shoes and tied a string of opal and topaz around her throat. She dabbed a haunting little fragrance at her wrists and throat—when she raised her hand, Stella cried out. Something was missing.

"Mother—mother—where is father's ring?"

Emily looked down at her blank hand with a little guilt. She had never liked Dean's emerald. He had given it to her once and she had refused it. When he gave it to her again he was a little gloating—and it had felt like a fetter. It was so large. It dwarfed her hand.

"Oh," said Emily, "I decided to leave it off. There is no green in my outfit."

Stella stood and stalked angrily downstairs. She watched Mother leave with Mr. Rankin through a crack in the parlour curtain. Nobody could see that she was there. Mother was laughing over something. Stella, who had once thought her mother did not laugh enough, now thought she did it overmuch. She sounded silly, flighty. Giddy.

Her feelings were so bruised that when Millie came up looking for her she shrank back into the shadows. Aunt Elizabeth, after calling for Stella for a while, said that she must be away. Millie ran off to look for her. A little while Aunt Ilse came up to sit with Aunts Elizabeth and Laura. "To talk things over," she said, and Aunt Elizabeth made a funny aside: "To _gossip_, you mean."

Aunt Ilse laughed. "I suppose I do," she said. "I'm feeling rather low now that Emily has taken up with Gussie Rankin." Stella thrilled to hear Aunt Ilse use such an unflattering nickname for him. "Oh, I don't like him. He is so determinedly cheerful whenever I see him that I find myself becoming as depressed as I can, just to see if I can bring him down, too. It's horrid, but I like a challenge. Last year when I saw him at Mina Howard's holiday do' I spent an hour telling him in detail about a train crash full of orphans in Toronto. And Gus said that those poor orphans must be so happy in heaven, that they were finally united with their lost parents, that it really was a blessing in the end. I wanted to _choke_ him."

"I don't know what Emily sees in him," ventured Aunt Laura, cautiously. "He is nothing like her. She is dark and he is light. They do not mix."

"Emily wouldn't mix with anyone," Aunt Elizabeth said grimly. "She is Emily. And besides—she has never gotten over Teddy."

Stella sat up, electrified. _Teddy?_ Who was Teddy? And why would mother never get over him? She shrank into the shadows and listened through the open window.

Aunt Ilse said, "I've never fully understood what happened there. Perry and I were newly-weds, you know—all the way in Charlottetown—and then we had Pierrot—and by the time we heard of anything Emily had gone and Teddy would not talk of it."

"It was a bad business," said Aunt Laura. "Emily and Teddy were to be married—everything was settled for it—_you_ were there, Ilse. You remember this part. We were so busy that we hardly made any notice of the Archduke being assassinated in Sarajevo. That was in June—we were fitting Emily's wedding dress that day. I remember saying, 'Oh, dear,' and going back to the hem. The wedding was for August—August fourth, nineteen fourteen. We were all assembled and the minister was just opening his book when old Douglas Courcy came running up the walk to tell us there was a war on. Of course we couldn't go through with a wedding that day—not after hearing news like that."

"That is when I began to think it would _never_ happen," said Aunt Elizabeth grimly.

"They pushed it back, I remember," Aunt Ilse went on. "And then Teddy—"

"Joined up," finished Aunt Elizabeth. "Oh! I can see Emily's face when he came to tell her. She said of course he must, but she was crushed. And then she said, in that—that _voice_, you know, 'If you go, Teddy—you will not come back. You will not come back to me. I know. I know.' The fog cleared and she couldn't ever remember saying such a thing. But I remembered."

"So did I," said Aunt Laura. "Especially when the news came that Teddy had been killed at Neuve Chapelle. Our first battle of the war. I remembered what Emily said—I remembered."

They were quiet out on the porch for a moment—so quiet that Stella thought they must hear her heart thump-thumping away. She pressed her hand to her chest and waited.

"She was inconsolable," said Aunt Laura. "She walked up and down her room all night—weeks' worth of nights—saying that it couldn't be, it couldn't, he couldn't be dead. She knew in her heart, sometimes, that he wasn't—at others she railed at herself. Her 'prophecy' had killed him, she thought. There was nothing any of us could say to change her mind."

"And then Dean came back." Aunt Elizabeth picked up the thread. "He had been living in Italy—he always seemed to know by instinct when Emily was most vulnerable. It took him the better part of two years but he managed to convince her to marry him. He told her she was all alone. And he was so ill. He needed her. She married him, and wept through the entire ceremony. It was _just_ as the minister was saying, 'I now pronounce you…' that the phone rang. An overseas telegram—Frederick Kent to Emily Starr. He had been a prisoner—he had escaped—he was alive. I shall never forget Dean's face. 'He is too late! She is mine, he is too late!'"

"I will never forget her going down on her knees," murmured Aunt Elizabeth, in a numbed sounding voice. "In front of everyone there. Humbling herself—begging him. 'Please, Dean,' she said. 'He is wounded and I must go to him. _Please_.' But Dean would not release her from her vow."

"And then Dean took her away—away to Italy," said Aunt Laura. "The idea of moving _to_ Italy during the war. I think he was afraid she would go to Teddy if she were near him. Or to the States for a divorce. But it might have been more than that. I think deep down Dean knew what he had done and hated himself. He _wanted_ to die. I think he was—tortured—by what he'd done—he _killed_ Emily, killed her as surely as if he'd actually killed her."

Stella could take no more. She stood up and ran on trembling legs to the porch where she faced her father's slanderers. "It _isn't_ true!" she screamed. "My father _loved_ my mother! And mother loved him! Oh, how _can_ you say these things!"

"My God, what have we done?" cried Aunt Laura, shocked enough to be profane, for once. "Stella, did you hear…?"

"I heard it all," the child sobbed. "Mother was never in love with this Teddy Kent fellow. She was in love with _my father_."

"Of course she was," said Aunt Laura soothingly. "Of _course _she was."

"Don't try to smooth me!" Stella cried. "Oh, I hate you—hate all of you—_hate_ you."

Aunt Ilse caught Stella by her arm. She said,

"I am very sorry you had to hear us talking of this, Stella. It was wrong of us and I don't think any of us will forgive ourselves for hurting you. You've taught us a lesson we won't forget in a thousand lifetimes. But you must compose yourself. And you must never speak to your mother of such a thing. If I find out you have asked her anything about Teddy Kent—or the war—or how she came to marry your father—I'll come down here and tan your hide. No—it isn't fair—but it wouldn't be fair to Emily to have you poking around in places she has tried for years to wall off. It would kill her, to make her speak of it. It would break her heart. Now, promise me."

By now Stella had quieted herself to shuddering sobs. She managed to squeak, "I promise," before tearing herself away. The three women on the porch watched her run helter-skelter across the fields, away from them.

"What have we done—what have we done?" wept Aunt Laura again.


	14. Speaking Out

Emily awoke in the night. The light from a waxing gibbous moon was bright through her window and touched the edges of things, making the world appear as if it were made of marble. She had been having a hideous dream—a loud storm—Stella crying out for her, afraid. Emily could not find her. "Mother, Mother!" came Stella's little voice, but Emily could not find her. And then Dean's voice, as familiar to her as the sound of her own heart: "Where is my daughter, Emily? What have you done with her?"

The anger in his voice—the coldness of it—had pulled her up and out of sleep.

She fumbled for the matches and lit the taper on the table by her bed. Three o'clock, by the little, cheerful-ticking brass alarm clock. Wouldn't you know it? Oh, three o'clock! That horrid song from the film she and Gus Rankin had seen tonight still rang in her ears. Emily closed her eyes but it was futile—sleep would not come again that night. Well, she might make the most of her wakefulness. She got up and found her wrapper, and sat down at her writing desk.

For the past month she had been working on a story that threatened to become something else. One of Stella's pictures had set it off—one of her 'dream pictures'—images plucked out of her head and set down on paper. Made from dreams! A misty scene of a street vendor in Paris, a grizzled old man, leaning down to whisper in a young girl's ear. It had reminded Emily of a story she had written very long ago. _A Seller of Dreams_. It had been drivel, she knew that now, but there had been flashes of _something_ in it. And she had destroyed it because Dean had told her to. Well, not in so many words. But it was gone, and she had never hoped of getting it back again.

And yet the story came to her again and whispered around her ears, needing to be put down onto paper. And so she wrote it again. Not the same story—she could not bear to revive her old characters. They had been real to her, and their loss had seemed like a death. If she brought them back to life they would be ghosts, pale imitations of what they should have been.

Instead, she used the same premise, but the characters were new. The 'seller of dreams'—a gypsyish man; a woman with a lost love; a rich man, looking to increase his fortune; an orphaned girl looking for someone to love her. Emily wrote so much and so fast that the book was already nearing completion. She wove the stories of the Gypsy and _Marie_ and _Quincy_ and _Little Julia_ together with such deft finesse that it startled her. She had forgotten she could write like this. It was not her lost book—not crackling with the same energy—but it was a good book, stronger. Perhaps better than the original had been.

But tonight the words would not come. Emily could not figure out a way to bring them all together in a happy ending. Her characters _would_ persist in doing things without her consent! She threw her pen down in disgust and chewed her lower lip. It seemed a long time until morning. She gazed at the flame of her candle until the room shimmered in a haze. She pulled a fresh page toward her and wrote. _Oh, Teddy…_

She wrote and wrote for what seemed like ages. She wrote an explanation. _Not_ an excuse. An apology, though. A bittersweet portrait of her heart, in words. The regret that was there. The regret that wasn't. But the love that had always been, would always be. Emily read it over and felt tears pricking at her eyes. She picked up her pen again and inked another line.

_Teddy, I know this may be, as Aunt Elizabeth says, 'Too little, too late,' but if there is any hope, please won't you come to me? At any time—I will always be waiting. I will always be hoping for you._

Her candle had burnt nearly out but Emily still felt the trance that it had inspired over her. She folded the paper in thirds, jammed it into her wrapper pocket, stepped into her shoes, and went for the stairs.

The sky was dark and the stars overhead seemed to hang down like jewels, suspaended at the ears and throat of a lovely, moon-pale woman. As she walked, Emily picked out Vega—Vega of the Lyre. Her breath caught in her throat.

The Tansy Patch was dark and she hesitated a little when she saw it. She was not even sure Teddy was here. Oh, she should go back! What if some respectable couple lived here now? She imagined a matronly woman kneeling down to find the paper, slid under the door, reading it? Whatever sense of modesty lingered in Emily's soul started squalling at the idea, but she quashed it. Who cared what anybody thought, when such things as _happiness_ and _destiny_ were at stake? Besides, she had not signed her note. Teddy—if he was here—would know who had wrote it.

She climbed the porch-steps and crouched at the door. She took the letter from her pocket and kissed it, feeling a little foolish. She laughed a little, and slid the letter under the door.

Walking back to New Moon, Emily Priest felt more like Emily Starr than she had in ages.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

In August, the light in the New Moon hayloft was incomparable. Bright and thick and golden. Stella had never seen anything like it, and was mesmerized by its beauty—at the same time, she could not bring herself to pick up her paintbrush and try to capture it. She had not touched her sketchbook in weeks. She could not bear it. Every time she did she came face to face with the desecration of Father's dear portrait—torn in two by Flora Norris's grubby hands. She could not bring herself to return to the Tansy Patch, not even for a dollar a week. She could not trust herself to be around Flora Norris without wanting to strangle her for what she'd done. She went desolately to Mr. Frederick's on the days that Flora was not there. The portrait was coming along nicely; so nicely that it made bile rise up in Stella's throat. Mr. Frederick caught her looking at the painting and came and stood beside her.

"What do you think, Little Star?"

"You've flattered her," Stella said, bluntly.

Mr. Frederick looked at her kindly. "Of course I have," he said. "Mrs. Norris wouldn't pay me if I gave Flora a hawk nose—or thick wrists—or a short neck. Irene wants to see light shining on golden curls—eyes that are more hazel than brown."

"You've flattered Mrs. Norris, too," Stella said. "You've taken away her double chin. And lowered her hairline. Oh, Mr. Frederick, I don't think you should have. I shall never paint anything that isn't _true_."

Mr. Frederick's eyes darkened at her criticism—but then he smiled. "I think it's a bit early to say 'never,' kidlet. You have a long and illustrious career ahead of you. Painters are _forever_ painting things that aren't true. Do you think Monet's water-lillies were an actual representation of water-lillies? Or Munch's _Scream_ an accurate representation of what the sky looked like on any night? Or Picasso's _Guernica_—Rouault's latest work is a perfect example. Do you know of Rouault, Stella?"

"_Know of_ him?" Stella said, rather scornfully. "I _know him. _Monsieur Georges lived one flat above us and taught me to ice-skate on the river Seine."

"Very well, Miss Show-Off." Mr. Frederick smiled. "That is well and good. But what I'm trying to say is: consider M. Rouault's _Crucifixion_. It shows Christ on the cross. Now, how could that be a _true_ representation of the event? It occurred two-thousand years before Rouault was born—it may not have occurred at all, to hear some people speak of it."

"Aunt Elizabeth would never let me come here again if she heard you say a thing like that!"

"So don't tell her. Here is the only truth about art, Stella. It's time you learned it. Each artist paints a vision of the truth, as he or she experiences it. It is true to the beholder but every person has his or her own truth. For instance—that portrait of your father, in which he looks gentle and kindly. You drew him that way because he _was_ gentle and kindly to you. But there are plenty of people who would say that Dean Priest was the most miserable and uncharitable of men, and that would be true, too, because it was the truth as they experienced it."

Stella burst into tears.

Mr. Frederick looked alarmed—and then a little ashamed. He had not meant to say the bit about Dean, but a dark temper had taken hold of him and shook him like a dog shakes its prey to break its neck. Stella was only a child—he forgot sometimes, because of her intelligence, her talent. She was a child and her father had died only months before.

"God forgive me," he muttered, gathering the little shaking body up in his arms. "Stella Priest, daughter of Emily, beloved of Dean, won't you forgive me if He can't? I've no right to ask it of you—it was a horrid thing to say. Listen to me now, honey: your dad and I had our differences but he was a fine person in many ways. I don't know anybody who knew more about the world, and if I didn't like him, I respected his knowledge. I'm sorry I said otherwise."

"I don't—see—why everybody's so down on Father," Stella sobbed, her eyes slammed shut, her thin little chest racking with grief. "He was—just—wonderful to me. But Aunt Elizabeth doesn't—like—him, and even Aunt Laura—and she likes _everybody_. And _you_—and now I'm not even sure that Mother loved Father, and the thought of it _hurts_ me! Mother _didn't_ love him—she loved Teddy Kent!"

Leaning on Mr. Frederick's shoulder, Stella poured out the whole story. What she had heard the aunts say. What she had heard Aunt Ilse say. The way that Mother had behaved around Father—the way she behaved now that Father was gone. She wasn't happier, exactly, but everyone could see she was more _hopeful_. "She thinks now Father's gone she can find Mr. Kent and _be_ with him again!" Stella wept. "Oh, I hate Teddy Kent, whoever he is. He could never take my father's place! And if he ever tried to, I'd—I'd—I'd run away! I'd just _die_, Mr. Frederick. I hate Teddy Kent—_hate _him—Hate him!"

Mr. Frederick let her go and stepped away from her. He turned to look out the window at the tansy blowing golden in the wind that came up from the sea. When he turned back, he said,

"I wouldn't worry about Mr. Teddy Kent, Stella. If he ever cared for your mother it was long ago, and I'm sure he doesn't anymore. If she cares for him, she only imagines it, and she'll get over that fancy the way people get over silly little things that cannot be. Don't cry, kidlet. I'll let you paint a wart on the end of Flora Norris's nose if you just stop crying. The sight of your tears rather makes me feel like crying, too, and that won't do at all, now will it?"

Stella dried her tears. The wart was duly painted, right on the end of Flora's (not) hawkish nose (and would be covered up again by Mr. Frederick at a later time). Stella knew this when she painted it, but just seeing it there for a little while made her feel ever so much better. By the time she went back to New Moon, she had quite forgotten her tears, and she played Mr. Frederick's words over in her mind.

"Teddy Kent doesn't love Mother—and she doesn't love him, really. It's silly for her to believe she does, but I've done many silly things in my life. I suppose I'll do plenty of silly things when I'm a mother, too—it is funny to think I ever might be. I certainly won't be as loveable as _my_ Mother! Oh, when I see her I'm going to give her a big smacky kiss, just so she knows that she's my favorite, favorite person—along with Father—and dear, dear Mr. Frederick."

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Emily stared down at the paper in her hands, feeling dull and dead inside. The wind was stirring the tops of the firs in Lofty John's bush, a bird was singing somewhere, and the sun that pierced the pine gloom was warm on her back. But Emily felt a deathly little chill as she read the words that Teddy had written her.

_Emily—_

_As Aunt Elizabeth might also say, 'There is too much water under the bridge' between us for any hope at reconciliation. My feelings for you were quite strong at one point, but they have burned out over the years for lack of fuel. I have my art—and you have things in your life that will distract you from whatever hurt you imagine you feel over this turn of events. Your daughter, for instance—turn to her, not to me. She has lost her father—and from what I hear she is at an age when she must need her mother more than ever. _

_I am sorry, but it cannot be._

_T.K. _

She read the words a third time, a fourth. And then she shredded the letter into little bits, watched them be borne away by the wind. They would molder into soil. Maybe the robins would use the scraps in their nests next spring. Maybe a wisp or two would be blown back to the Tansy Patch and Teddy would lift it up, recognize his own cold words.

"Well, that's that," said Emily, feeling as though some spark in her soul had finally—finally, after all those long years of faith!—gone out.


	15. Dreams and Hopes

"Well, we've had a golden summer at least," mourned Millie one sweltering day in late August when summer seemed to still in its full swing. Anyone who saw the girls lounging in the New Moon hayloft would have certainly thought that Millie's eulogy on Lost Summer was a bit premature. But school would start the next week; Mother had gone down to Blair Water primary only the day before and come back with a stack of books for Stella to peruse—arithmetic, Canadian history, earth science, and most tantalizing of all, the Fifth Reader, which was full of poems and stories and snippets of Shakespeare that made images crowd into Stella's head, waiting to be borne by paper and paint into reality. From _The Tempest_, Miranda's lament:

_O, I have suffered__  
__With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,__  
__Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,__  
__Dash'd all to pieces._

"I think," Stella remarked upon reading it, "That I am going to like school." Stella's education had been thorough as befitted the daughter of Dean Priest—but her school attendance had been spotty. Father had been content to teach her before, and even when he had been really ill, he had not wanted her to stop learning things. They had read together in the mornings; Dean sent his daughter out into Paris on scavenger hunts for particular things: a rock, glittering with mica, a leaf from a deciduous and from a conifer, a flower, which they dissected and examined (though it seemed to Stella a little like murder). They had looked at anatomy books and traced the muscles and bones of the back, so that Stella understood the physiological reason why Father had one shoulder higher than the other. She sat on his bed as he recited thrilling firsthand accounts of climbing the pyramids at Giza, at the geography of the Nile, which he had seen from the deck of a riverboat. In later years she would realize what a treasure her seemingly haphazard education had been; now, at the tender age of eleven, she was only looking forward to the foreign ritual of carrying her books in a strap every morning to the schoolhouse, of blackboards and eraser and chalk dust, of 'reading, writing, and 'rithmetic.

"It ain't all like what you read in books," Millie sighed. "If it was all shipwreck stories it'd be great fun. But there's sums and fractions and Latin and all those dates—William the Conqueror did something or other in 1066—something else happened in 1215—or was it the Conqueror in 1215 and something else in 1066? See, Stella? I've been going to school my whole life and I _still_ can't keep them straight."

"Well, I am going to have a good attitude about it," said Stella, staunch to her fingertips. "Pierrot has been helping me with the things I don't know. I'm awfully sorry he has to be at the high school in Shrewsbury, though he'll be home every night. Back in Mother and Aunt Ilse's day you had to room and board in town, but now Pierrot can ride the bus there and back every night. It's a wonderful modern age we're living in, isn't it, Millie?"

"I'd say it's tolerable," said Millie, thinking of the new gas oven that was being installed in her kitchen at home that very week. "And Pierrot _might_ as well be away at Queens for all we'll see of him. He's awful fun in the summertime but once school starts he's never around. He has his head in a book from dawn to dusk—and sometimes back till dawn again. I don't see why he's so determined to get good marks," Millie confessed, honestly. "Pa's MP, after all. Pierrot will get to go to whatever college he wants no matter what his marks are."

"I understand," said Stella, a little passionately. "Of _course_ Pierrot doesn't want people to think he only got places because his father helped him. I _admire_ him for it, Millie. How would _you_ like it if everybody thought you couldn't cook because Aunt Ilse can't?"

"She can so," said Millie, loyal to her mother.

"Oh, Millie, last week she made mashed potatoes from a box! Aunt Elizabeth almost _died_ from the shock of it."

"Well, they were good, weren't they? You almost couldn't tell at all when you put enough butter and salt and pepper on them. Pierrot had three platefuls."

"I'm going to miss Pierrot," Stella mourned, this time sounding just like Millie had when she'd expounded on the topic of the summer's passing. "Millie, I don't know a soul in Blair Water besides our folks and Mr. Frederick. You and Jack Kelly are going to be my only friends in the whole school. If Pierrot were home I'd have three, at least."

"You'll make friends real quick," said Millie, who was considered one of the most popular girls in her class. "I've had heaps of time to tell everyone about you while you were out painting with Mr. Frederick. If I tell them to like you, they'll like you."

"I don't want them to like me because _you_ told them to," Stella said, peevishly. "I want them to like me for _me_. It's exactly like Pierrot wanting to get into school on his own merit."

"Well," said Millie, equally peeved. "You _are_ an ungrateful little puss, aren't you? You might _need_ my help, you know. The Murrays are known to be a proud lot, and you keeping your little nose in the air all the time don't help matters none."

"My nose is not in the air," Stella said, haughtily. "It is just where it should be."

The girls were over-warm and tired out by the heavy heat; they parted ways somewhat discontented with each other. But Stella knew Millie well enough by this time that she knew on the morrow all would be forgotten, so she did not worry over it. She stopped by the house for a drink of lemonade and then decided to go on a ramble, with her sketchbook. When she had just gotten to the Tomorrow Road, she met with Pierrot Miller, coming home from the post office, his hands full of packages.

"Hail fellow, well met," he grinned at Stella. "Walk home with me, Stella. I could use a hand with all these parcels."

Stella relieved him of a few parcels and staggered under their weight. "Oof! Pierrot, what have you in these, rocks?"

"Books," he said laconically. "I've looked over the curriculum for Shrewsbury and it's a little light in the behavioral sciences. I'll never get into McGill without that sort of knowledge. So I'm going to put myself through a course of reading on my own. And there are some interesting developments in physics—and I had to get the new edition of Darwin's _Origin of Species_…" he trailed off with a rueful smile.

Stella looked at him gravely. "I hope," she said, in a concerned tone, "That you remember to have a little _fun_, Pierrot. It's well and good to work as hard as you can—but you should play as hard as you can, too. Or else what is it all for?"

"What's it for?" Pierrot Miller's eyes, behind his round steel-rimmed spectacles, took on a fierce look. "It's for the advancement of humankind, Stella Priest! Of course I don't think I'll end up being another Einstein—or Darwin—or even another Frederick Banting—but I might do something very small, when, added to the rest of medical knowledge, helps others to do great things. Being a doctor is like belonging to a great chain of thinkers, Stella. I want to forge my own little link in that chain—be it gossamer thin, I want to do _something_ to ease human suffering on this planet. That's what it's for."

"I never thought of it like that," said Stella, a little admiringly. "Pierrot, let's stop here for a minute—I want to get a drink of water from that stream. It's awful hot."

She went and got her drink, and then came back and sat down on the sunwarmed grass in the shade of a large birch tree next to Pierrot, who was paging through one of his new books. Stella reached over and picked up a flyer lying on top of a parcel. "The Young Canadians Competition," she read, "Meet the great thinkers of the next generation—Pierrot, what's this?"

"Oh," he said, looking up. "It's a contest for students—ages ten to twenty, I think. They want submissions by young people in all the areas of the arts and sciences—poetry, fiction, art, engineering. The whole rigmarole. I'm going to submit a paper on the theory of evolution that I wrote for biology lab last year to the science competition. The prize is a hundred dollar scholarship."

"When you say _art_," said Stella, slowly, "Do you mean things like—painting?"

"Sure I do," said Pierrot, flipping the pamphlet open and pointing. "Right here, see—'student submissions in the area of oils, watercolors, drawing, sculpture, textiles and photography.' That's you, Stella. You should enter."

Stella mused a moment. She thought of receiving a letter in the mail notifying her of her success—showing it to Mother—even to Aunt Elizabeth. Aunt Elizabeth could not be upset at her spending so much time drawing if she was judged best young artist in Canada! A 'great thinker of the next generation,' even! Oh, she might not win, but then again, she _might_!

"I am going to enter," Stella said, decidedly. "Pierrot, would you mind awfully if I didn't help you carry your books the rest of the way home? I am going to sit right down and look through my sketchbook now and decide what to send."

"Not at all," said Pierrot. "I'll see you later, Stella." He grinned at the black-haired little scamp, already busy leafing through her drawings, tapping her pencil against her paper as though she _meant_ it. He thought suddenly that perhaps he and little Stella Priest were more alike than he'd previously thought. What a pity she wasn't older! But then, there were plenty of pretty girls that handsome Pierrot Miller could unburden himself to.

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"Stella, dear," called Emily, up the stairs, "Supper's on the table, darling."

"Not hungry," piped back a little voice, and Emily smiled, recognizing the tone. It was just the one she had always used when she was in the middle of a particularly dramatic scene. She would set something aside for her little artist later—for Emily also knew well that when the sudden passion of creation had burnt itself out, a rumbling tummy might remain.

Stella sat on the floor of her little room, with all of her pictures spread out around her. A half dozen of Millie—one of Mother, that she was transferring to oils—a series of Aunt Ilse, doing the shimmy-shake. Which to send to the Young Canadian competition? And should she try and send a canvas? No, she decided—she was still clumsy with paints. She had a better chance of winning for drawing. She held up her portrait of Aunt Elizabeth and looked at it critically. It was good—but some might say it was derivative. A picture of one of Aunt Laura's friends' grandbabies was sweet—but there were a thousand pictures of babies. Anyone could draw a baby!

Stella thought of her lost picture of Pierrot. It had been wholly _him_, in a way her other pictures were not. The sun on his fair curls—his eyes dreamy and half-hidden behind his spectacles—the determined quirk at the corners of his mouth. She would call it, _A Portrait of the Doctor as a Young Man_. She would—if she only knew what had happened to it! But try as she might she had not been able to find it after the day that Flora Norris had trampled on her portfolio.

"I bet Flora took it," she grumbled to herself. "_And_ she ripped up my portrait of Father—my best portrait, and the only one I had of Father."

Stella reached for the two pieces and held them together. Her father's face, peaceful in its repose, had been split down the middle by Flora's cruel ministrations. But there was no denying it had been one of her best works. Perhaps if she worked very diligently, she could draw it again, before the contest deadline? But _could_ she, really? Could she finish it in time?

"Anything can be done with a little grit," said Stella, with a sense of conviction that would have made Aunt Elizabeth proud.

She spent an hour sketching away, consulting her old drawing for reference. When her hands had started to cramp, Stella put her book and pen aside and crept down to the parlour, where Mother was answering letters. "Mother," she said, somewhat shamefacedly, "I'm sorry I missed dinner. Is there anything left? I'm _awful _hungry."

Emily smiled. "I think we can rummage something up. Come along, little Star, and tell me what kind of magic you've been making for yourself. For I know you've been making some."

Stella looked torn. "I'd love to tell you," she said. "But it's such a delicious secret, Mummy. And I'd rather wait and see how it turns out. That way you can have the _complete_ story. I don't mean to hurt your feelings, Mother dearest."

"And they aren't hurt," Emily said. "I can appreciate a good story like anybody else. I'm willing to wait."

Stella ran her arms around her mother's slim waist. "You're the best kind of understandingest Mother," she marveled. "There's only one thing that could improve you."

"Oh?" Emily's 'oh' was arch. "What would that be?"

Stella grinned. "If you'd saved me a piece of Aunt Laura's devil's food cake. I could smell it all the afternoon when I was working. It was _nearly_ enough to make me put down my pen."

"Well, I wish I'd thought to save you one piece…"

"Oh, Mother! You _didn't_?"

"No." For a moment Emily looked distressed and regretful, but then she dimpled. "I saved you _two_."

Stella rewarded her with a kiss.


	16. School Days

Stella slunk home from school that first day of the fall term—yes, slunk. She had her mother's languid grace and it is hard to imagine her slim, birch-branch of a body doing any such thing, but I assure you she did. Her back was bowed; her shoulders brought up to her ears. Cousin Jimmy observed her coming up the lane and said, "No—it can't be _our_ little Stella." Stella did not _slink_. She walked with her head up and her shoulders back—like a princess. He turned back to his potato-patch with a jaunty whistle that belied the ache in his old bones and Stella, observing him, felt as friendless as any friendless person in the world!

"Not even Uncle Jimmy loves me," she said, as she collected her paints from her bedroom and set off. For if she could not be on the exact opposite side of the world from that horrid Blair Water schoolhouse, she would like to be at the Tansy Patch, at least. Millie met her on the way and was surprisingly mum. She slipped her little hand into Stella's and occasionally cast anxious glances up at her friend's face as they walked.

School had not been a success for Stella. It had started off badly—she had gotten lost in the maze-like corridors of the poky school building—which was a flat, unglamorous sort of place. Unglamorous! Why, it was downright _ugly_—there was not one speck of beauty in the whole place. It was nothing like the old mellow shingled schoolroom that Mother remembered from her New Moon days. 'Blair Water Municipal School District'—even the name was horrid. Stella had gone into a classroom and sat down. She had not realized it was the wrong classroom until halfway through the first lesson, when the teacher had remembered to take roll. What shame!—as she was made to get up and leave, twenty pairs of eyes on her back! And what regret, too, for the Sixth class had been reading Poe. 'Once upon a midnight dreary…' What pictures had popped into her head. And then to be brought up out of the rhyme and meter to be told she did not belong!

The sixth form teacher took pity on her and delivered her to her own class personally. "Mrs. Norris," she said, "I've found a wayward traveler for you." The Sixth form teacher, at least, was sweet-looking, with dimples serving as parentheses for a wide smile. She knelt down and squeezed Stella's hand and told her to come back and tell her what she thought of _The Raven _when she finished it.

Stella's own teacher turned and her eyes were pale and cold. "Take your seat," said Mrs. Evelyn Norris cuttingly. "And you will stay in at recess to make up for your tardiness."

"But I didn't _know_…it was a mistake…"

Said Mrs. Norris, "We do not tolerate mistakes in this classroom. Nor lame excuses."

It was all downhill from there. Flora Norris's mother was no better than Flora herself. Stella had thought a woman and a mother might be above such cruelty. But Mrs. Norris was not. Millie seemed to know what she was thinking and said, "It isn't you, dearie. Mrs. Norris _hates_ having to teach school. It's the fault of her embezzler husband, you know. He bled the well dry, and now she must work. She doesn't hate _you_ personally—she hates all of us."

"Perhaps that might have _been _true," Stella sighed. "But after I corrected her about the placement of Addis Ababa during geography class I think she began to dislike me for me."

"Well," Millie surmised, "You might have been a little less sure about it. The way you just blurted out that she was wrong without even raising your hand! The hair went up on the back of my neck at that, to be sure."

Mr. Frederick met them at the door, in a clean suit and tie. "I'm meeting with a client today," he said, "In town. So it looks like you young ones will have the run of the place. Try not to burn anything down and if you've any extra time between your gossiping sessions see if you can't turpentine those brushes. What," he made his voice a growl, "Are you looking at me like that for?"

"I've never seen you dressed up," said Stella, her eyes wide. "Why—Mr. Frederick—you're _handsome_."

He frowned but they could tell he was pleased because he went down the lane whistling.

They cleaned the brushes and then Millie began to root through the cupboards for ingredients. "Not a scrap of bread in this house! What does the man _eat_?"

"Maybe," ventured Stella, "He eats _bread_. And that's why there isn't any."

Millie did not answer; she was sifting flour in a delight. Stella sighed and pulled her sketchbook toward her. She set the tip of her pen to the page and made a few quick lines: a face. Two gigantic eyes. A cupid's bow mouth.

"Millie," she giggled, "Come and tell me who this is?"

Millie whisked by with a basket of eggs. "Why, it's Ella Bates in our class," she said. "It's her to the life—except you haven't made her look stupid enough. D'you know, I heard her say in history last year that The _Scarlet Pimpernel_ was one of the ships in which Columbus sailed to the new world?"

Stella added a dazed, vacant shine to Ella's eyes. "She _is_ pretty," she said, admiring her handiwork. "I'd give up most of my brains if I had golden hair."

Millie, who _had_ golden hair, said, "Oh, Stella! I'd _much_ prefer brains. And black hair isn't so bad. I heard Pierrot say that seeing us together was like looking at day and night. I'm day of course—brash, hardy day. I'd much rather be soft, silky night."

Stella tossed her black braid over her shoulder and tried not to look as pleased as she felt. "I looked over at Ella's notebook during arithmetic and she had written nothing down but Mrs. Jim Sullivan written over and over again in fancy loops. Can you imagine thinking Jim _Sullivan_ the bee's knees?"

"He looks just like a monkey," Millie said, kneading her dough with aplomb.

Stella drew Jim Sullivan, paying particular attention to his ears. She did not know it, but she had a special mastery of the style of drawing known as caricature—a wonderful, or terrible, knack for honing in on a person's worst feature. If Mr. Frederick could have seen her sketchbook he would have held his head and groaned. And then he would have praised her.

"Not monkeyish enough," said Millie, when Stella held up Jimmy's portrait for her to see. So Stella added a body and a pair of long, apish arms, and drew Jimmy swinging from a vine against a backdrop of jungle foliage.

"Perfect," pronounced Millie.

They made a game of it while they bread rose, sitting together in the yeasty-smelling kitchen. Harriet Mills, a supercilious girl, who was rather plump, was made positively rotund by Stella's pen; George Rockwell, who had pulled Millie's pigtail during lunch hour, who was quite tall, was drawn like a beanstalk, with his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds. Rachel O'Dowd, who was inordinately proud of her long, flowing, unbobbed curls, and was rather snobbish about it, was rendered as a pair of eyes peeking out of a bush of hair. Millie, who had something of a knack with words, wrote a limerick for each of the sketches.

_Do call me "Rachel-the-fair!"_

_I always am brushing my hair_

_I walk on the ground_

_But if it rains, then I'll drown_

_Because my nose is stuck up in the air. _

"Oh, we're wicked!" Stella giggled. But it was remarkable how good that wickedness felt after such a long, trying day.

"Besides," Millie pointed out—daughter of a lawyer to a T!—"We aren't being cruel _exactly_. It's _true_ that Rachel is vain and Harriet is a priss and George is just awful. You saw how he thrashed Jack Kelly at recess today. And Rachel O'Dowd just stood by laughing! Oh, oh—they _deserve_ to be drawn and rhymed about this way!"

"All the same," thought Stella to herself. "I would not want Aunt Elizabeth to see me doing it. So it _must_ be wrong."

They worked their way through the class, drawing except for Lulu Strang. "I _like_ Lulu," Stella pronounced. "She's a girl with some spirit. We should make her part of our group. But I do so want to draw her—all those cowlicks in her hair! Why doesn't she plaster it down with water?"

"The Strangs haven't got good sense," said Millie. "You haven't drawn Mrs. Norris and you might. Get a fresh page for her."

"Oh, we _couldn't_," said Stella, thinking that she _could_, and of how satisfying it would be.

"Why not?" asked Millie. "When we're done here we'll burn the pages and nobody will know but us. And it will relieve your feelings."

Stella drew hesitantly, as though she expected at any moment to be caught. A long oblong for Mrs. Norris's face, which was rather long. Two narrow, treacherous eyes—a little knot of hair on the top of her head. A mouth that was exaggerated into a prim moue of disapproval. As she drew, and nothing terrible happened, her strokes got surer. She gave Mrs. Norris an _overflowing_ bosom that made it look as though she would topple over. A large nose, which Evelyn Blake had been self-conscious about even in her Shrewsbury High days. When she was finished, Millie composed a rhyme. "Go kneed that dough again," she said, chewing on the end of her pencil, which meant that she was engrossed indeed.

The finished product featured both Stella's drawing and Millie's rhyme.

_I'm Mrs. Evelyn Norris!_

_Of all teachers, I am the sorest. _

_I prattle all day _

_Though I've nothing to say _

_And the students cry, "Teacher—you bore us!" _

"I rather like that you rhymed 'bore us' with 'Norris,'" Stella said, appreciatively.

"I thought it was quite keen myself," said Millie, going back to her bread. "Say, Stell! Have you submitted a drawing to the Young Artists and Thinkers Exhibition yet?"

"No," said Stella. "I keep forgetting. I'm never in the vicinity of my sketchbook when I remember. Oh, I _wish_ horrid Mrs. Norris were here to hear me toss of 'vicinity' so fluidly! I couldn't remember it during vocab this morning and felt a fool."

"You've your book now," said Millie. "Borrow an envelope from Mr. Frederick and we'll post it on the way home. This bread is almost done and I promised Mother I'd be back in time for tea."

Stella grabbed the offered envelope and opened her book. She addressed the envelope with the address of the post office box in Charlottetown. But her mind was dancing ahead of her, as it always was wont to do. There had been a nip in the air on the way over; suppose it was time for Cousin Jimmy to boil the pigs potatoes? He hardly needed to do it anymore—they could buy a bag of feed in town for half the price—but of course he still did. It was a New Moon tradition. She had never seen such a thing in all her travels and she wanted to, very much. Mother promised it would be a lark and a half.

"Come _on_, slowpoke!" called Milllie. Stella grabbed the first drawing in her book and folded it into the envelope. She licked the flap and sealed it. Borrowed a stamp from Mr. Frederick—she felt sure he wouldn't mind.

"I'm coming!" she called back to Millie. The girls linked arms and went out into the golden embers of the day.


	17. The Way of Transgressors

"October, October!" cried Stella, standing at the kitchen door one morning in that very month. "I am so glad to see you, old friend. I felt sure you wouldn't come to me this year; we move about so much; and it was so warm and golden this past week that I thought you couldn't find me. But you always do come to me—you have never once abandoned me yet. Oh, Aunt Elizabeth, don't you think that October is a beautiful pale girl with crimson hair like a maple-leaf, who steals over the hills in a gown of aster-purple?"

"I _think_ that if you do not come and eat your breakfast now, you will be late to school," said Aunt Elizabeth.

"Normally I wouldn't feel like eating on such a lovely morning," Stella said, coming to the table and sitting down. "But I promised Jack Kelly I'd let him walk me to school today and since I have to wait here for him I might as well eat while I'm waiting."

"You might as well," agreed Aunt Laura, gravely, pouring the tea by feel.

Mother padded into the kitchen, then, still in her kimono, and yawning, for she had been out with Gus Rankin very late the night before. Stella had heard Mr. Rankin's car in the driveway and the sound had woken her from the bottom of a deep dream. She could not forget how long it had been between the sound of the car and the sound of Mother coming up the stairs. She felt a little cold, even now, thinking of it. So when Mother asked, in her usual loving way,

"How is school going for you, lately, Star o'Morning?"

Stella could not bring herself to pour her heart out. "It's fine," she said, coolly—so coolly that Mother's tilted eyebrows went up a little. Stella hardened her heart. She pictured Father's face as it had looked in that last moment—the way she had drawn it, in the drawing she had submitted to the Young Artists Exhibition only last week. The deadline for the competition had come and gone—the results were due to be out by Friday.

"Really fine?" Mother persisted, and Stella wavered. To say that school was 'fine' was only true by the greatest stretch; to say it was _really_ fine would be a lie outright. And Stella did not lie. So she did not say anything at all. She was saved by Jack Kelly hollering her name from the yard.

"Stell_aaaaa! _STELLA!"

"I must be going," Stella said, while Aunt Elizabeth muttered under her breath about Kellys and tinkers and knocking on the door like any normal person.

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Every day, as she walked the leaf-lined paths to school, Stella promised herself that today it would be different. She would be on her best behavior; she would keep quiet and not doodle on her slate; she would remember to raise her hand before speaking instead of crying out the answer as soon as it popped into her head. She might be forgiven for her past transgressions if she could only be very good.

As she walked, Stella thought less and less of school, and more of the great beauty that surrounded her. She had never seen an autumn on the island before; it was unlike autumn in any other place in the world. The deep red hue of the soil was reflected in the leaves of the scarlet maples, and a smoke of mist lay coiled upon the distant purple hills like a great sleeping dragon. A misty dragon—a protecting dragon—that curled its wet shimmering wings around all of Blair Water. The pair of wanderers came around a bend and a field of violet asters was before them, stretching as far as the eye could see. Sweet, darling flowers—with their open, honest faces. The color that was just a shade off of Mother dearwums's striking eyes.

"Jack," Stella said, seized with passion, "I must draw this. Just a quick sketch—I'll color it in later. Do you think we have the time?"

"A' course," said Jack, agreeably. He was none-too-concerned with things like timetables. And so Stella, planning on making only a quick five minute stop, sat with her sketchbook in her lap for a quarter of an hour. She had noticed a cunning little house down in the hollow of the hill—a sweet little silver-shingled cottage of a house, half-surrounded by a spruce wood.

"Jack," she breathed, "Who lives there?"

Jack shrugged. "It's been empty as long as I was alive. Probably it's ha'nted."

"Oh, _no_," said Stella, shaking her head. "That house couldn't be haunted. Not by ghosts and ghoulies of the traditional sense. If it is haunted it is by the idea of memories that never happened. It's haunted by hope." She shivered. "I have such a strong impression of Mother when I look at that house—I wonder why?"

The loud clanging of a bell floated to them on the wind. Stella dropped her sketchbook and her eyes grew very black. School had started—and they were still half-a-mile away.

"We'll be late," she shrieked, and grabbing Jack's hand, began to run.

As her feet pounded the hard-packed lane, Stella pictured Mrs. Norris's face and all she could think was _please—please—please_. By the time they reached the school building her lungs were bursting. All _looked_ innocuous. Perhaps she hadn't been missed? She and Jack made their way inside and to their classroom. It was English class—Mrs. Norris was reading aloud from the textbook. Stella said a silent prayer and eased the door open. She thought for a split second that all would be well, but then Mrs. Norris's face turned toward the door, and her eyes flashed avidly in her thin face.

"Stella _Priest_," she pronounced, her voice heavy with false sweetness. "And Jack Kelly—but then I should have _known_ you two would be together." Titters among the class. "Do not bother sitting down—you may go directly to Headmaster Charles's office."

"Oh, please," Stella gasped, "Don't hold Jack accountable for my mistake, Mrs. Norris, _please_. Why—it wasn't his fault—you _can't_."

"Do not presume to tell me what I may and mayn't do," snapped Mrs. Norris, her face turning ugly. "You are only a little girl—a very _naughty_ little girl—and I am your teacher, and your better. But I should have known that the daughter of Emily Starr—and _Dean Priest_—would quite naturally set herself above all other mortals. Your Mother has always had too high and opinion of herself—and your father, too, though I hardly know why he _would_."

"_Don't_ say another word about my father!" Stella cried. "_Or_ my mother! My mother loves the world and loves life, and she loves people! _You_ only look at the world and see the bad in it—and you _hate_ other people because you only see in them the things you want—but can't have!"

It hit too close to home for Mrs. Norris. It showed plainly on her face that it did. Even the students knew that it had—there were no titters or giggles now. Everyone looked at their feet, and shifted nervously. Mrs. Norris crossed to the doorway in two large strides—there was a sharp crack that made everybody look up at once.

Stella held her cheek where Mrs. Norris had slapped her and her eyes spilled a sudden torrent of tears. She had never been struck, for any reason, in her life. She could hardly believe it had happened. She longed to throw her head back and wail, long and loud—to sob—to reach out and grab handfuls of Mrs. Norris's hair into her fists. But she was a Starr—she was a Murray of New Moon—she was a _Priest_. She had too much pride for that.

Stella kept her voice even and willed it not to shake as she looked up into Mrs. Norris's face. "I _pity_ you," she said, because she knew it would hurt Mrs. Norris the most. And then she turned and ran.

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She could not go home. She could not! Oh what—what—would Aunt Elizabeth say? For surely Aunt Elizabeth should have heard what had happened. Stella knew instinctually that Mrs. Norris would have called and told, with a supercilious air, what had happened. She had—almost immediately after Stella had fled—but she had conveniently omitted the fact that she had said those things about Emily—and Dean—and she had not said a word about the slapping. Stella only knew that she could not go home. She took to Lofty John's bush and lurked in the shadows. Presently she climbed up into the branches of a fir, which afforded her a vantage point of New Moon and its environs. Oh, what a disgrace she was! And how she hated Mrs. Norris!

After a little while the door of New Moon opened and a thin, gaunt figure came out. "Stella!" Stella heard Aunt Elizabeth call. "Stella _Priest_!" There was a fierceness to Aunt Elizabeth's voice, and Stella shrank back against the trunk of her friendly tree. Aunt Elizabeth stalked about the yard, and went back in, shaking her head. "Don't know where—could be," Stella heard her say to someone in the house.

She leaned her head against the tree and wept. If only her Father was still alive. Then they would never have come to New Moon. She was surprised her heart squeezed at the thought. Of course she would give anything to have Father alive and well and with her again—but she loved New Moon. How sad—if she had never met Aunt Laura or Cousin Jimmy or dear Millie, or wise Mr. Frederick! Oh, she was _glad_ to have met them! She could put up with anything from Mrs. Norris—_they_ were worth it. Stella would face her fate—she wanted to be the kind of person that they would love. That her friends and family could be proud of. Not a scared little girl, hiding her face in fear!

"What are you doing up there?" said a voice, from down below.

Stella looked and there was Pierrot Miller, holding his books. The sunlight glinted off the face of his spectacles. Pierrot had an armful of books—he often came this way home from school. Had she really been up in the tree for hours? Stella's stomach rumbled and she knew she must have been.

"Don't come down," Pierrot said. "I'll come up."

He climbed up the branches easily—he had inherited his mother's lithe grace. Pierrot perched on a branch and surveyed Stella's tearworn face. He smiled.

"Little bird," he said, "Someone has winged you—winged you badly, haven't they? I met Millie on the road with Jack and Lulu Strang. They were indignant over what had happened to you. I had the whole story, Stella—not the garbled version of it that Mrs. Norris is no-doubt spreading around. Stella—she had no call to speak to you that way—but if you look at things a certain way, it's all right that she did, because you can learn a lesson from it. It takes years for people to realize that adults are not always right—and most people have to learn it from an adult they love well. It's disillusioning when it happens that way."

Stella hugged the tree and thought long and hard. "How did _you_ learn it, Pierrot?"

He smiled, and straddled his branch. "It was years and years ago—I was about your age or younger, and I was playing at Rod Brownell's house. His mother—odious woman—was discussing, in none-too-low tones—the topic of _my_ mother. A very long time ago, my mother was engaged to be married to a man—and on her wedding day, she left him at the altar, and ran away to be with my father."

"No!" breathed Stella. "Oh, Pierrot, how romantic!"

He screwed up his freckled face. "Maybe," he said, "If you look at it one way. In another light it seems indicative of all sorts of bad qualities. If Mother didn't love this man, why did she agree to marry him at all?—and couldn't she have found a better way to let him down than to abandon him at the altar? It was wrong of her, and I began to think of things that Mummy does that are sometimes _bad_—not _too_ bad—but she loves to gossip, and laugh at other people when they do things that she considers amusing. I love her for it—mostly—but I wondered, after hearing that story, if she wasn't—a little—cruel? Of course I'm glad that she and dad worked it out—or else I wouldn't be here—but from that day on I realized she was flawed—like all people. And, Stella, it hurt—it hurt me a little to realize it."

Stella thought of the look on Mrs. Norris's face—she thought of gay, laughing Aunt Ilse—she thought of Father's desire to always have his own way and Mother's dark moods. Perhaps Pierrot was right. She wondered what fault-lines lay in her own personality and if they stood out glaringly to others as others' did to her?

"What a pair of monkeys!" said a voice from down below and both Pierrot and Stella looked down to see Emily, standing looking up at them. She grinned, cheekily, and hauled herself up on the branches until she was sitting with them. "Stella," she said, reaching up for her daughter's hand, "I've been out looking for you since the morning, darling. What a fright you gave us all! Aunt Laura has been in a swoon since the call came from the school."

"Oh, Mother," Stella said, "Is everybody terribly angry at me?"

"No," said Emily, stroking the angry red handprint that stood out so boldly on her daughter's cheek. Stella was too tear-blinded to see, but Pierrot Miller saw the flash of sudden anger in Emily Priest's eyes. "Aunt Elizabeth was," Emily admitted, "Until Millie and Jack and Lulu came by the house to tell your side of the story. And then she was angry at Mrs. Norris. And worried—as we all are. Won't you come home, darling?"

"Yes," Stella sobbed. "Yes, mother—I will."

Pierrot climbed down, too, and the three of them made their way back to New Moon. Stella, woozy and exhausted from the day's events, told her story as best she could. Emily dried her tears and fed her and took her upstairs for a warm bath. "I won't ever go back to school," they heard Stella vow, and Aunt Elizabeth shook her head, grimly.

"Irene Norris is a beast," she said. "No great-niece of mine will go back to that school as long as _she_ is there."

"Never say never," said Cousin Jimmy, in the mysterious way he had.

In the room at the top of the stairs, an exhausted little girl cried herself to sleep. Emily sat by her daughter's side and stroked her shining hair until her breathing lengthened and deepened.

"I should have ruined Evelyn Blake when I had the chance," she rued, and then she leaned down and kissed the sleeping face. How like a flower it was!


	18. Stella Wins a Prize and Learns a Lesson

October was a goblin month for Stella. She had spent Octobers before roaming in spicy redwood forests; she had seen the sky beyond _La Tour d'Eiffel_ grow purple and smoky with autumn; she had even had a fanciful autumn in the Southern Hemisphere which was warmer than summer was, up north! But she had never spent October on the Island, and there, she was to learn, were the nicest Octobers of all.

She rose with excitement each morning and went to her window to see how the world outside it changed. First the leaves on the maples blazed yellow—then scarlet. Distant plumes of smoke rose up from chimneys in the valley. There was the delightful tang of juniper and frost in the air, and the sky was a lovely, misty lavender—quite the color of Mother's eyes. Mother, Stella reflected, was beautiful in every month, in every clime: but here, at New Moon, she seemed to belong to October. It brought out the elfishness of her ears, the mystery in the shadows that pooled at her milk-white throat.

Stella sighed, as she pulled on a warm sweater over her corduroy jumper, thinking of Mother's slim white throat. For if she, Stella, admired it, wouldn't Gus Rankin admire it, too? Boys were like that, she was starting to learn, from watching Pierrot and Jack. There was not much about the female form they did not notice, or appreciate. Stella stepped into her shoes and buckled them, reflecting that really the only thing that could make her happier is if such a person as Gus Rankin did not exist. Or—if he _had_ to exist, that he would _stop_ taking Mother on 'dates.' Though nobody at New Moon called them that, that is what they were. Oh, a mother shouldn't be 'dating'—not when Father was so newly gone from their lives!

Stella caught her face in the mirror. Stella-in-the-glass looked chagrined, and with good reason. She amended her previous statement: the only thing she needed to be happy was _Father_ himself. If he were back! All the Gus Rankins in the world wouldn't be too high a price to pay for having her dear darling again with her.

Emily wondered over breakfast what had the child looking so grim, and decided on an impromptu holiday. They would go a-rambling over mist-filled hollows and browning meadows. It was the nice thing, Stella thought, of having a teacher like _Mother_. Since she would not go back to the school, Mother taught her at home, in the dear New Moon kitchen. She missed Millie and Jack and her other friends. But it was nice to have mother to herself. Stella realized that even when Father had been alive, she had never had Mother to herself. She had always seemed to belong to him, first. This new glut of Motherness was like a gift, and she began to bless Mrs. Norris for being so hateful, so that she could experience it. Well—sometimes.

Stella's hot anger at Mrs. Norris's treatment had cooled, and now she only felt a little ashamed of losing her head like she had. But Mrs. Norris was still very angry. This, Stella knew, because of Millie's daily updates, on her way home from school. She came by the kitchen and propped her feet up on the stove, and told Stella of all the news on that front: They had acted out Tennyson's _Queen Mary_ in class, and when Lulu Strang had recited the line—_Methinks a cold face, and a haughty_—Mrs. Norris had said, "Sounds like someone we know, hmm?" Leaving no doubt whom she meant. She commented daily on the quiet and order that had been restored to the classroom since "certain misbehaved little girls" had been removed from it.

"She looks like a fat, smug cat," said Millie hotly, with a toss of her dandelion curls. "My, I'd like to snip her whiskers!"

"I don't care," said Stella, but she did, a little, 'way down deep.

A truly horrible day came when Aunt Elizabeth had _made_ her go to the Post Office after the mail. For two weeks Stella had been sequestered at New Moon, licking her wounds, seeing nobody from the outside world except Millie and Jack, and Pierrot, and the school superintendent who had come to chide Emily for keeping her daughter out of school. But Aunt Elizabeth had put a bee in _his_ bonnet. She turned the tables on him, and chided him for having a teacher like Evelyn Norris at the school in the first place. The Superintendent did not believe Mrs. Norris was so bad. Nobody else complained—"Too scared to," Aunt Elizabeth retorted, implying that, at least, _she_ wasn't. The Superintendent went away still unbelieving. Aunt Elizabeth was irritated, and she took her irritation out on poor Stella.

"Make yourself useful, child, and fetch the mail. It's the least you can do—always underfoot, always causing trouble like—"

For a moment, Stella thought Aunt Elizabeth would say _like your mother_.

She did not want to go. Suppose she ran into someone from school? Suppose—heavens—that she ran into Mrs. Norris? That would be worst of all. But haply, she had been reading Tennyson herself, in her studies with Mother:

_Courage—courage!_

_And all will go well._

She went. She went bravely. She would hold her head up and if she met anybody she knew she would stop and talk with them. She would _not_ be afraid. She would NOT see Mrs. Norris.

She saw Mrs. Norris straight away when she entered the Post Office. For an unspeakable moment, Stella thought her teacher would _come and speak to her_—but Mrs. Norris, upon recognizing the young interloper, looked through her, like glass. Stella quailed in her boots, but she had enough Priest in her to be able to parry a glance like that, and enough Murray besides to do it convincingly. She accepted the New Moon mail with her chin uptilted, her heart beating in her throat.

As she left the office, she thought she heard Mrs. Norris laugh—and that was the worst of all, the worst thing, even worse than what she had said about Father. To be _laughed_ at!

But it was a fine, mellow afternoon and her spirits soon rose. Goldenrod was out along the roads and she loved it. She leafed through the mail, the letters for Aunt Laura, which Stella would read to her after supper. A letter from Mother, from a firm called Warehams—Stella did not know the name, and so she assumed it must be a lawyer's office. The Eaton's catalog for Aunt Elizabeth, a seed catalog for Uncle Jimmy—aha! Away down at the bottom of the pile, a thick packet for Stella, herself!

She tore into it, there on the road. _Dear Miss Priest_, it began—the first time anybody had called her that in print. A shining moment—but nothing compared to what came after. _She had won the Young Artist's competition_. 'Your talent is remarkable for your age, and your piece is featured in the latest issue of the Young Canadian, with the other prize-winners.' She was lifted up, up—she noted with some dismay that she had won the category of 'caricature drawing'—she did not care, she had won, won!

She ran home as fast as her legs could carry her and spilled her story to the family—and horrid Gus Rankin—but she did not care. "I've won—Mother—drawing competition—submitted a portrait I did of Father—Aunt Elizabeth—published in the Young Canadian, here. I've won, I've won!"

"Well, let's see it," said Aunt Elizabeth, particularly coldly, because she was so proud.

She had not even though to look, out on the road! With fumbling fingers she leafed through the magazine now. Where was her name? Where? Oh—here…but—

"That is not Father!" cried Stella, aghast.

It was the picture she had done—the nasty picture—_of Mrs. Evelyn Norris_. With her mouth plummed up and her eyes long and disapproving. Millie's verse had been reprinted underneath, but with the name removed. Oh—_OH_—she must have sent the wrong drawing by mistake!

Still, there was no doubt who it could be. The entire assemblage knew it at once. The aunts—Mother—Cousin Jimmy—Gus Rankin—they all looked shocked.

"STELLA PRIEST!" Aunt Elizabeth cried, "What have you done?"

"Oh, Aunt Elizabeth," Stella said, stricken to her core, full of contrition. She put her hands out in front of her, beseechingly, meaning to make an apology. But different, unexpected words came out instead: "Isn't it a _little_ funny?"

Aunt Elizabeth did not look as though she thought it funny at all, but Gus Rankin did.

"By Jove, it is," he said. "And you can't deny Evelyn deserves it."

He laughed long and hard, and for the first time, Stella liked him a little.

Aunt Elizabeth did not laugh, but in the end, she managed a feeble smile. "But this will be the end of us," she pronounced, in ominous tones. "Mark my words."

It was not the end of them—but it was the end of Mrs. Norris, or at least the end of her tenure as a teacher at Blair Water Elementary. Students for years had hated her and found her cruel, but had been too afraid to speak for fear of her redoubled anger. Now, Stella and Millie's act had loosened their tongues. _They_ had spoken out, and they were standing to tell the tale. One by one, schoolchildren began to talk. Tales of Mrs. Norris's abuses were spread about like wildfire—entirely unenhanced by exaggeration. They did not need to be. The truth was terrible enough as it was. Mrs. Norris was on the verge of being asked to resign when she announced to all and sundry that she had tired of Blair Water, and would be taking her daughter and removing to town, where things were far more civilized.

Nobody bought it but they did not try and stop her.

A new teacher was retained at once: a stranger to the area, by the name of Cecilia Redfern. She was a millionaire's daughter from Ontario—granddaughter of Bernard Redfern, Doc Redfern of yore!—and she did not need to work, but _wanted_ to teach. It was strange to the people of Blair Water, and they did not have high hopes about this new teacher. Quite likely she would be as bad as Mrs. Norris—but there was a vacancy, and any port in the storm.

Jack Kelly looked askance at Stella as they played in the yard at New Moon. "Remind me to never cross you," he said. "You've ruined Mrs. Norris forever. You're a great girl for revenge."

"You could never cross me, dear Jack," said Stella—but said it sternly, so he would not get any ideas. "And when all is said and done, I'm _sorry_ for Mrs. Norris. I didn't like her—I hated her—but I didn't want to ruin her. I—I'm glad she's gone—but I don't like the feeling I have, knowing I was part of it. Oh, Jack, this has been a great lesson to me. I shall remember this all my life. From here on out, I shall never use my talent to express meanness or cruelty _ever again_. I resolve, with those beautiful purple asters as my witnesses," Stella raised her hand to the flowers, solemnly, "That I shall _always, always_ use my talent as a power for good."


	19. A Little Hero Worship

Even with Mrs. Norris gone, Stella was shy about returning to school. She had been away from her friends for three weeks—she thought that they might not remember her, or if they did, that they might somehow resent or dislike her now, after what had happened. She refused, at first, to go back. But when Aunt Elizabeth put the kibosh on _that_ idea, Stella announced that she would only go to school again if Mother walked with her there in the morning.

"As if you were a great big baby!" Aunt Elizabeth huffed. "Instead of a girl of nearly twelve!"

But it was Emily's eyes who flashed at that. "It's not babyish to want a little companionship, Aunt Elizabeth—it's _human_. Stella, dear, of course I'll walk with you—I want a little fresh air myself. I'll just go and get my scarf, Elfkin, and we'll be off."

"She spoils that girl horribly," said Aunt Elizabeth, when mother and daughter had gone.

"Stella is all Emily has," Aunt Laura said wisely. "Let her spoil her, Elizabeth—and _you_ spoil her, too. Because besides Emily, we are all that girl has."

Stella clung to her mother at the schoolhouse gate and would not let her go until Emily promised to come back at the end of the day to collect her. Emily rambled a while in the brown November chill and worried about her girl. Stella really _had _been upset. Would she be all right? Would the new teacher be any better than Mrs. Norris?

It was a radiant Stella who met her at the gate that afternoon, and Emily exhaled in relief, bending down to kiss her daughter's cheek—not bending _so_ far, not so far as she had used to—in sheer relief.

"I love our new teacher," Stella pronounced, as she and Emily made their way home through hills of fallen leaves. "And I don't mean love as Aunt Elizabeth thinks I mean it. I mean _love, really love,_ Mother."

"Well, tell me about the woman who has captured your heart," smiled Emily.

But Stella was solemn in her new-kindled admiration. "Miss Redfern is very small and slight—only a little taller than me, Mother. I mistook her for a girl when I went into the classroom—a new girl—and thinking I could have a sort of outsider friend I said, 'Oh, who are _you_?' And she turned and she said, 'I am Cecilia Redfern, my dear, and you must call me Miss Redfern in class, but I do hope that you will always think of me as "Cissy"—all my friends do.' She clapped her hands and brought the class to order—she has such long, slim hands—I shouldn't have any problem painting _those_ hands!"

"_Have_ you such a problem?" Emily wondered, and Stella colored. She had almost come very close to telling her mother about Mr. Frederick. At times she _wanted_ to tell Mother, but it was nice to have a secret and if she told Mother she might slip—and mention it before Aunt Elizabeth, who would decidedly not approve of her consorting with An Artist. Stella hurriedly brought the subject around to Miss Redfern, again.

"She has such a dear little face—like a kitten. Triangular, with dark eyes, and a little mouth that falls open to reveal such little teeth. Her hair is a mahogany brown, and her eyebrows are just a shade darker: one of her slim eye brows is an arch and the other is a triangle. It gives her such a _cunning_ air. She's not pretty—not _exactly_—not beautiful like you, Mother. Oh, but she's ages younger—" and Emily smiled, amused, deciding to separate the wheat from the chaff in that compliment. "Miss Redfern is only just nineteen years old. She is from Toronto, but she says her _heart _is from a back-woods place called Mistawis. Her grandfather _is_ Doc Redfern, like everybody says, but her father is John Foster. After class, I told her that Daddy owned all of John Fosters works and read them to me, and had met her father on his tour of Europe. 'Why, we're practically like _family_,' Miss Redfern said.

"Oh, Mother—I thought at once when I saw her I should like to paint her—and I _did_ draw her, during arithmetic, which was naughty of me, don't you think? It would have been well within her rights to scold me but when she caught me she only said, 'Well, Miss Priest!' I think that in my dotage I shall become famous for boring people about how I once taught a Famous Artist. But please _do_ try and keep your mind on your sums—just in case that doesn't work out for you.' Miss Redfern thinks a woman should be just as educated as a man—'more so,' she says, 'because we women have a harder lot, and must always watch out for ourselves.' Millie loves her because Miss Redfern tasted some of her cookies and nearly swooned. And Jack Kelly says that if she wasn't so old he'd set his cap for her, instead of me. He's still not sure he won't. Oh—Mother—I'd like to have her come to tea for my birthday in March. I know I've already invited Millie and Lulu, but we could squeeze one more in, couldn't we? Because I _would_ so like to get to know her better."

"I think we could," said Emily agreeably, thinking of another teacher, once, who had praised her talents and given her ambition.

But Stella did not have to wait so long to become better acquainted with Miss Redfern. She met her on the way to the Tansy Patch one day. Stella was going to see Mr. Frederick—she had been so immersed in school that she had neglected him of late—and she had some very pretty pictures of the first snowfall that she wanted to show him. Real pictures—not just drawings—Mother had given her a Brownie box camera for Christmas, and Stella had been trying her hand at photography. Miss Redfern had been out rambling, with no purpose. She brightened when she saw Stella, and linked her arm through the girl's.

"Hello, Stella," she greeted her pupil. "Oh, I'm glad to see a friendly face—like _yours._ I've been a little lonely, today; I don't mind telling you—you won't laugh at me. But I miss my family and my Mistawis so much. I thought my visit home for the holiday would relieve me of my suffering—but it has only made me miss them more, being parted from them so soon."

"Do you have a lot of family, Miss Redfern? Lots of brothers and sisters?" Stella asked this question with all of the only-child's eagerness. She could imagine nothing better than a sister and brother or two.

"Three—two brothers and a sister. Artie's a dear—about your age, a little older. My sisters are closer in age—Janet and Yvette. We call her 'Eve.' Oh, we fight like cats and dogs when we're together! But I find, when I'm alone in my room at Mrs. Lister's house, that I'd love to have them there to quarrel with me. Things get so quiet—and then I'm alone with my thoughts, you know."

Stella nodded sagely. She _did_ know.

"I'd love to get a house of my own," confessed Miss Redfern. "Just a little bide-away—I'd have to get a housekeeper, but I've got her picked out, too. Mrs. Fred Evans—she looks positively gypsish. But there's not a house around here that would suit me: save one. It's over by New Moon aways—I wonder if you've seen it? A little house in a spruce grove, with—"

"A good mix of birches," Stella finished for her. "A little gray shingled house—am I right?"

"Oh yes—I'd buy it if I could, even if I had to use all of Father's millions to get it. Well, Stella, we seemed to have arrived where you're going," for they had come to the Tansy Patch and stopped, "So I'll leave you here. _This_ is a darling house—even if not quite as dear as my little spruce cottage."

"Won't you come in?" asked Stella, on impulse. "I am only going to see a friend of mine, but I think you'd like him very much. And he doesn't mind when I bring visitors—though he pretends to."

"I _am_ frosted through," said Miss Redfern. "Well, maybe for a moment."

Mr. Frederick greeted them at the door, and before Stella had time to make introductions, Miss Redfern had cried out in recognition.

"Why, hello!—do you remember me?—because I remember _you_. You illustrated the frontispiece for Father's _Mountain Laurel_ books when I was just a little girl. Oh, it's _good_ to see you again, Mr. K—"

"Mr. Frederick," Mr. Frederick said, quickly, and meaningfully. "Yes—I remember you—Barney Redfern's girl. Cecilia? Why—you were knee high to me when I saw you last, and now you're here, and grown. It's a funny old world, isn't it?"

"Oh, it is!" Miss Redfern cried, with a bell-like laugh. "And you're Stella's friend—it just goes to show that we certain kind of dreamers have a way of meeting up in the world. You can't deny fate."

"Mr. Frederick is Millie's friend, too," said Stella loyally. She did not want Millie to be left out. She wanted them to all be friends together.

They had tea together and cake that Millie had brought over earlier in the day, and sat for a long while and talked, while the day drew down into night outside the window. Stella showed her photos to Mr. Frederick and he was so critical of them that she knew there must be some value in them, somewhere. She had to be home for dinner, and was glad to see the adults linger in the twilight before parting. She wanted everyone she loved to love each other, too. Stella flew home, gloating.

She found her Mother seated at her desk in her room. When Stella entered, Emily quickly ruffled a few pages out of sight, but her daughter was too blissful to notice the gesture, or to notice the Wareham's envelope on the desktop. She threw her arms around her mother's neck and nestled on her lap like a child half her age would do. But Emily found she did not mind.

"It's a funny old world, isn't it, Mother?" asked Stella, echoing Mr. Frederick's. "Funny—and lovely—and sweet, very sweet."


	20. Together

In February Stella was ill. Because she had been so sheltered in her early years, she had never had any of the ailments that were always plaguing other children. Now, as though to make up lost time, she came down with measles and mumps at once. She had a mild case of both, and was never in any real danger, but she was a very uncomfortable girl for a span of three weeks, not only because of physical pain but because she missed her dear friends so heartily. Millie and Pierrot had never had measles and Jack had never had mumps, and so they were kept away from her.

Miss Redfern had had both, and she came to visit Stella daily, and Stella tried not to mind that she reported such good times among their burgeoning little crew. They had made the best of the recent snowstorm and gone sledding. They had gone skating, too. Stella especially loved skating. They had all made 'snow cream' by pouring maple syrup over bowls of the cold white fluff and had eaten it with spoons, though Aunt Ilse had been worried over automobile exhaust and had told them _not_ to eat any snow from the road. Speaking of automobiles—Mr. George Paul had gotten his stuck in a snowbank, and had said in a fit of pique if anybody could get it out, they could keep it. Gene Lister had taken it up on it, and worked at the car for six solid hours, and had started it and then driven it triumphantly up to Mr. Paul's window, and Mr. Paul had had no choice but to hand over the keys. (Only Mr. Lister was a good fellow and gave the keys right back). They were reading _Peter Pan_ and acting it out, and Millie was the Indian Princess Tiger Lily, and was required to make the most dreadful war-whoops and the first time she had tried the whole school had come running, sure that someone was being dismembered in 5A. Stella was keeping up with her schoolwork and reading the play on her own. Miss Redfern and Mother came and helped her with the voices, and sometimes Mr. Rankin came up and did a bloodchilling Captain Hook, which made Stella like him a little bit. But it was not the same.

Miss Redfern seemed to notice Stella's wistfulness, and the next time she visited, she brought with her a sheaf of letters—one from every student in the class. Stella was delighted, and since it was the first day she was allowed to get out of bed, she read them sitting by the fire in her own little room, to Mother and Cousin Jimmy and the Aunts and Mr. Rankin. Lulu Strang wrote that she was saving Stella a beautiful peacock feather that she had found on a hat in the attic, and that she planned to make Stella a head-bank that would look 'simply darling, just like a flapper.' Vain Rachel O'Dowd wrote that she hoped Stella would not be 'disfigured forever' by her measles, and offered the wisdom of not scratching 'even if you want to terrible—_and_ _you will_.'

Everybody seemed to have something to say about how to treat her ailments: George Rockwell told her to 'ask your ma for some calamine lotion—Murrays are awful mean, to hear it said, but it's not too dear.' (The next day Aunt Elizabeth went to the store and bought six bottles of the awful pink stuff, right in front of George's mother, plunking each bottle down on the counter with a heavy, deliberate thud). Jim Sullivan told her to eat a lot of lemon candy. He had heard it helped with mumps 'and even if it doesn't, you still get a lot of candy.'

There were a few surprises in the bunch. Chubby Harriet Mills, whom Stella had never liked, because she had thought Harriet did not like _her_, wrote that

…_I acksually cried to hear that you were On the Brink. O, Stella, it is no fun without you in class. You are a great girl for fun and I never knew how much I liked you untill you were gone. I do hope you will get better soon and when you come back I promise that I will get over being so shy to you and try to be your good friend. I have lost six pounds since you have been gone but I do not think the two are exactally related but perhaps they are. _

"Oh, I _do_ like having a lot of friends," Stella remarked to her mother. "Harriet is sort of a dull girl but I think I can cure her of it, with time. And perhaps she has hidden depths."

She saved Millie and Jack's letters for last and they did not disappoint.

_DEAR STELLA_, Millie had written,

_I just want you to know that I am saving up resipees that I'm going to make for you when you are better. Gee, honey, I'm no good at writing letters. I'd rather call you on the phone. When WILL Ant Elizabeth get a phone at New Moon? They used to have one and then your Ma Went away and they got rid of it. People said it was because the Murrays are too good to talk to ordinary people_. _Well, now you are back and I want to talk to you so maybe you could ask them to get a phone for you? Only we could not talk about anything to sensitive on it because you know Pearlie Stuart is always listening down the receiver. _

_Here are the things I am going to make for you when you are well: Pepperment iceburg puffs, New England Cranberry Pie, and Twinkie pudding with bananas flambé. (That means on fire but since we are not allowed to play with matches I am not sure how I will manage it. _

_I'm awful glad you didn't die because 1) I love you and 2) it is your birthday next month, and I got my new dress for it today. Wow! You should see it. It is pink with a drop waist and no fringe but a little beads around the neckline. I tried it on and rolled my stockings down and Daddy said I was too young but Mother shouted him down. So I will have rolled down stockings at your birthday and a headband like yours but with a dyed osstriche feather. (Pink). _

"Perry is right," muttered Aunt Elizabeth. "Ilse dresses that child too richly for her age."

"Ilse likes to do it—she never had any nice clothes herself until she was grown up," Emily reminded her.

"Well," Aunt Elizabeth sniffed, "If she doesn't change her ways, perhaps her history will repeat itself with her girl—_in other ways_."

Aunt Elizabeth's 'in other ways' was very revealing, and left no doubt of what she meant. Stella knew at once that she was reminding everyone of the fact that Millie's mother had once been engaged to another man—had left him at the altar.

"Millie would _never_," she began, before thinking that perhaps she wasn't supposed to know. She opened Jack's letter, to deflect Mother's questioning look at her.

Jack's letter was written in his messy scrawl, and punctuation was not a thing he cared overmuch for. But good humor filled every line.

_Dear Stella I hope you are getting better and I hope you will come to play with us soon Millie is driving me bonkers She says that she isn't going to speak to me again after I said the apple tarts she made today were no good at all They were but I just wanted to get a rise out of her My it's easy and I can't help doing it even if I feel bad after_

_I hope you will not have any lasting scars from your illness for I want my future bride to be pretty Millie is looking over my should she said that's shallow and that I am not much to look at but I mean to be better looking when I grow up My pa's cow calved today and I saw it happen it was pretty interesting and if I cannot be a doctor like Pierrot I think I would like to be an animal doctor which is called a veterinarian Or else I would like to be a solider But I suppose that will not ever happen since we have already had The War To End All Wars but one can hope can't he_

_Your friend John Arthur Aloysius Kelly (JACK)_

All the adults were laughing but Aunt Elizabeth looked scandalized and didn't bother trying to hide it. Calves—brides—soldiering?

"What do you expect from a grandson of Jock Kelly?" she said, jerking her knitting needles. "A common peddler!"

"Jack is a good, hearty, kind-hearted lad," Gus Rankin remarked. "I like him very much. And there's nothing devilish in wishing for a war when you're that age. He can't know what it means—not really—and our entire culture spoon feeds him 'dulce et decorum est.' I learned it myself, and I wanted the chance to fight—until I got it."

"Were you in the war, Mr. Rankin?" asked Stella. Somehow, she had not ever really thought of Mr. Rankin having a life before that day he had popped into theirs on the Shrewsbury road.

"I was at Passchendaele," Gus Rankin said. "I shall never forget it as long as I live. I hope against hope that Jack Kelly never gets this thing he wants so badly, now."

They were all quiet a moment while the fire hissed and popped. There was one more letter—Stella recognized Pierrot's writing. She unfolded it and smiled. She did not read _this_ letter aloud, and did not know why. She only knew that it was meant for _her_, and her only.

_Dear little Star, _Pierrot wrote, and Stella did not mind him calling her 'little' when it was used that way. She expected more of the same from the other letters, but she should have known better. Pierrot was not like other people. He had written a fanciful little tale from her.

_Once upon a time there was a band of merry travelers that lived on earth, but they were soon tired of the earth and all its troubles and woes. So they built a birch-bark boat ringed with candlelight—for among all the things of man, they liked witchy-candlelight the best—and sailed it to the moon. But the moon was bare and ghostly and they were not any happier there. So they took their boat and sailed among the stars, looking for the place to be their home. They saw many beautiful stars—blue giants, red drawfs, twin suns—but they were not happy with any of them. Then, in the sky, they saw a beautiful lyre rise up, and they knew it meant music. They made their home in the shining star, there. _

_Stella, if you go to the window, now, and look up, you can see that star. _

"Oh!" Stella cast her letter aside and went to the window and threw up the sash. The cold air came in but Stella did not look up at the star. There, standing down on the snow-covered ground outside her window, was the merry band of travelers: Jack and Millie, Pierrot and Miss Redfern. They were all holding little candlelights except for Jack, who had his violin, and was playing, while the others sang,

_We strolled the lane together,  
Laughed at the rain together,  
Sang loves refrain together,  
We knew long ago  
That our love would grow.  
Through storm and sun together,  
_

_Our hearts are one together,  
You're gone from me,  
But in my memory,  
We always will be together._

It was a moment of high melodrama and overblown sentiment, and the grown-ups looked like they knew that, but also like they did not care. Gus Rankin stood a little closer to Emily, who deigned to let him put his arm around her waist. Aunt Elizabeth did not look as disapproving as she should have. Aunt Laura hummed and tapped her foot, and Cousin Jimmy, if Stella would have looked at him, would have seen he was having one of his far-away moments. But she did not look. She leaned her chin on the windowsill and smiled and smiled, and when the song was over she blew copious kisses to her friends. She would never forget that night—she almost thought that getting sick had been worth it, to have such a nice thing as that done for you.

* * *

In another week, Stella was well enough to go back to school, by the doctor's pronouncement. But Aunt Elizabeth insisted one more thing be done. She did not hold too much stock in modern medicine: Stella's hair must be cut, lest the long dark mass of it sap her strength and she get sick again.

Emily fought her long and hard, but in the end, Stella capitulated. She did not mind having her hair cut, looked on it as an adventure. She let Aunt Elizabeth bob her hair, and when it was done she tossed her head, feeling light and free. But Emily wept and wept.

"Don't cry, Mother," said Stella. "I _love_ my new hair. Why, I feel just like a flapper—and now Lulu's head-band will look just right on me. Not even Millie has her hair bobbed! Mother—Mother darlingest—don't you think I look a _little _pretty?

Emily looked at her daughter's face. She had grown up in an instant—the high cheekbones showed more plainly now, the woman that Stella would be was, for the first time, in her face. She wiped her tears and smiled and said, yes, of course, the girl looked very pretty—very beautiful—indeed.

But oh! Not like her baby anymore. She crept into the room that night while Stella was asleep and looked at that face—so familiar and yet so strange—on the pillow.

"Dean," she whispered. "If you could see her! If you could only see her—the best of both of us—our wonderful girl!"


	21. The Truth Comes Out

Stella was to be twelve in mid-March, and Emily, thinking of how ill the child had been, threw herself into preparations for it. Stella had never been in any real danger of not getting better, but Emily, with her mother's heart, _had_ had times when she had looked down on that little, pallid face, and wondered. _What would I do without my Star_? _Should I have loved her more—played with her more—been more unselfish toward her, patient with her? O, Lord, if she only gets better, I will, I will. _

And there was another reason for Emily's wanting Stella to have the best birthday of her young life. It was the child's first without her father, and Dean had always made a fuss over birthdays. He had been semi-strict with her at other times, but on March sixteenth, every year, Stella had a carte blanche and may spend her day any way she wished. One year, her eighth, when she had first fallen really in love with drawing, Dean had taken her to the National Portrait Gallery in London, for a behind the scenes tour, arranged by a friend from his old traveling days. And then, when Stella had been ten, she had wanted to have a "grown-up" supper party, in their Paris flat, and invite her favorite people: Georges, the organ-grinder, and his monkey, Claude, who sat at the table and used his fork and knife perfectly; _Soeur _Regine, her favorite teacher at school; and Miss de Beauvoir, their pretty, writerly neighbor, who wrote Stella a charming little crystal-ball prediction of her future life. "Oh, I love it!" Stella had crowed, and Miss de Beauvoir had replied, "Well, if you want _really_ good writing, _cherie_, you should look no farther than your mother's own—"

"Thank you, Simone." Emily had cut her short, a shadow passing over her face for the first time that day. The Frenchwoman's eyes had clouded, and then, passing from Emily to Dean, lit up with a spark of sadness.

In Blair Water, there were no organ grinders, or nuns, or female story-writers—save one, perhaps—but Emily was determined nonetheless. She arranged a tea party for Stella and as many guests as she would like to have, out on the lawn, since spring had come early to the Island and the weather had turned fine. They would have an old-fashioned luncheon, and play croquet, and have dancing, with the gramophone brought out to the verandah and cranked for dear life. She ordered little lanterns to hang from the trees, and she and Aunt Ilse tasked Millie with devising a perfect menu. They were both accomplished cooks, Emily Priest and Ilse Miller, but for a fete such as this, they trusted nobody but the master herself. Aunt Elizabeth, however, had gotten into the spirit of the day and was apprehensive about leaving such an important duty to one so young. But Millie put her in her place with aplomb.

"I've never been so insulted in my life, Auntie E," she said, with a toss of her caramel-colored curls. "I'm making everything pink because it's Stella's favorite color—raspberry torte, and strawberry ice cream, and blancmange, and iced cookies and rhubarb pie—and _you'd _want to break up the color scheme and have cucumber sandwiches, to boot, and doesn't Stella hate the color green? Besides, if you don't like my eats, you've nobody to blame but yourself, because everything I know I've learned from _you_." Millie punctuated her diatribe with a smacky kiss, to take the sting from it.

Even though she was more excited for the day than she would admit, Elizabeth Murray looked askance at the invitations that Emily ordered from town: engraved on heavy cardstock, more like something you would send to a wedding than a child's birthday. And that formal wording, engraved in heavy script:

_You are cordially invited_

_To a birthday party for_

_MISS STELLA PRIEST_

_At New Moon_

_16 March 1929_

_at Four o'clock__._

"Isn't it a little too much, Emily?" she asked, nervously. "You'll spoil that child dreadfully."

"Stella is either spoiled or she isn't," said Emily staunchly. "There's no use quibbling over it at this late date, Aunt Elizabeth. Besides—she's _twelve_. That's a young woman—oh, Aunt Elizabeth, of course I'm glad my girl is growing up, but I miss my baby so—the little sweetums I used to cuddle to my breast, all chubby knees and dimples. She is sweet now—but she was so sweet, then, I couldn't stand it."

Aunt Elizabeth—and Aunt Laura—said nothing. They had never seen Stella at that age. She had been off roaming the world, with Emily, with Dean, who had no love for any of the New Moon folks. They had not clapped eyes on their niece outside of a photograph until the day, last year, when she had appeared before them, looking like Emily from long ago.

Stella and Millie were in the hayloft, attending to the guest list. "Me and you and Pierrot and Jack, of course," said Stella, ticking the names off a long list. "And Lulu and Jennie. And Miss Redfern, of course. Plus the home folks. That makes thirteen—and that's an unlucky number to have at a table. I don't want there to be anything _unlucky_ about my birthday. Who else should I invite?"

Millie stretched out against the hay, luxuriously. "What about Mr. Frederick?" she asked.

"Do you think he'd come?"

"He mightn't want to. But I think he'd do anything for you, if you only kicked up a fuss about it. Write him down, Stella. It's odd that he hasn't met your ma and all those folks before. I heard your ma today say that she wanted to meet this Mr. Frederick that she heard Jack talking about. She was really very curious, Stell. Ask him."

"All right," Stella said, and wrote his name down. And then her face clouded. "I suppose I have to ask Mr. Rankin, too. But Millie—I _like_ him, but I don't want him there. I don't like the way he looks at Mother. Like—like he wants to _eat_ her. Oh, I'm afraid he's going to ask Mother to marry him, soon, and then what will I do?"

"Don't do anything. Mr. Rankin is jolly. He gives me a fifty-cent piece every time I see him. Besides, wouldn't you like to have a father?"

"I had a father," said Stella softly. "I still do, Millie. And nobody could ever replace him in my heart. _Especially _not Gus Rankin."

But she wrote his name down, anyway.

* * *

Just as Millie had predicted, Mr. Frederick tried to get out of going to the party. But the girls would not have it.

"You must come!" Stella cried, tears lingering on her long lashes. "Oh, Mr. Frederick—it wouldn't be _complete_ without you. And you're my good friend—after Millie and Jack and our crowd—and mother, of course—you're probably my _best_ friend! And I missed you so much when I was ill. Please come—won't you?"

Mr. Frederick wavered. He _was_ fond of Stella, and he hated to see any feminine creature cry. It had gotten him into a lot of trouble when he had been a young man, this willingness to do anything to staunch a pretty girl's tears. He looked down at the little flower faces—a pansy and a buttercup—before him. And then Stella said something that swayed the balance.

"My mother wants to meet you very badly. Oh, _please_, Mr. Frederick. Come and meet her."

"Your mother…" He could not believe what he was hearing. "Your mother asked about me—wants me to come? Even knowing…how I feel? She does?"

"Yes!" Stella wriggled with happiness. "She's a very welcoming person. She'd love to have you! And so you _will_ come?"

Mr. Frederick put his hands in his pockets. And relented. "Fine," he growled. "I'll be there. But I'm holding you to your promise. I'll drop by, but I shan't stay long."

Stella was so relieved he had agreed to come at all that she did not care. "Wonderful!" she cried, and she threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him, and Mr. Frederick, who was not used to being hugged, or kissed, or wanted places so desperately, thawed a trifle under her caresses, and patted her head.

The day of the party dawned beautiful and airy—perfectly springish, Stella thought, as she dressed herself in her new dress—a present from Aunt Ilse. A beautiful pink flapper dress to match Millie's, a shade or two more rosy than Millie's pale one. With little fluttery lace sleeves, and a flapper headband, a pink ostrich feather, that she left off in favor of the one Jenny had made for her. Stella brushed her new bobbed hair until it snapped and then ran downstairs to show herself to her mother.

"Beautiful," Emily pronounced, but she could not help locking herself in the pantry and weeping, hotly and furiously, for a few moments after. As soon as she realized it was because she felt _old_, to have a beautiful, almost-womanly daughter like that, she made herself stop.

All the guests—save one—arrived at the appointed time, and the party was underway. They demolished Millie's sweets, and played three games of croquet, and then they danced the Charleston on the lawn, while Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Laura retired to the shade to sniff disapprovingly and clap in time with the music, respectively. Stella had specifically requested no presents, but everyone had brought one, accordingly. She was opening the last when Mr. Frederick arrived, coming around the back of the house into the yard. "You came!" she cried, tossing aside the book from Uncle Perry, who did not mind—until he saw the man that Stella was racing toward. In fact, everyone's heads turned toward the man that had appeared in their midst. It was Aunt Elizabeth who named him, in tones of shock and horror.

"Teddy Kent!" she said wondrously, and then sat down, hard, in her chair.

Everyone looked to Emily, who looked like she might faint, as Stella brought her drawing-master over to meet her mother. "Mother darling," said Stella, who had not heard Aunt Elizabeth's ejaculation, "This is my dear friend…"

"Teddy," Emily breathed. Oh, how he had _changed_! And yet—there were some things that even fifteen years could not take away from him. He was as handsome—and brooding as ever—more so. She found herself wondering what things he was noticing about _her_: the gray in her hair? The tired lines around her mouth?

He took her hand. He took it! And he was standing so close that Gus Rankin, who had been standing a little behind Emily, took a step forward—and then stepped back again. Good Lord, he was a brave man, but he did not want to get caught up in this. The soldier, whom they had thought dead, but who had come back to life—too late! The tall, slim woman with the stricken face and haunting eyes! The little girl, whose mouth had dropped down with horror, who reached up to slap her mother's hand from the man who was holding it….

"_What did she call you_?" Stella flung her question at Mr. Frederick. "_You're_ Teddy Kent—you? You're the one who my mother wanted to marry—she begged my father to let her go! She wanted _you_? And you never _told me_?"

Said Teddy Kent—Mr. Frederick no longer—"I thought you knew, Stella." He turned to Emily with pain in his eyes. "I thought you, too. She said—you _asked_ after me—I thought it was all in the open. I thought if you were willing—then I might make the effort—"

Emily shook her head, mutely, but Stella spoke enough for the both of them. "How could _I_ know?" she cried. "She," pointing to her mother, "_She _doesn't tell me anything about her life. Oh, don't _look_ at her like that, Teddy Kent! It makes me perfectly ill. Why couldn't you have stayed _dead_? _You're_ the reason my mother was never happy with my father—you weren't, Mother! You always wanted something else. And now I know what! You never loved Daddy. You loved HIM! You wanted him, you didn't want us. And Father never let us come back—because he _knew_ that you would—would run away. Back to Teddy Kent!"

The child began to sob. Nobody—not even Aunt Ilse—dared move. It was beautiful Miss Redfern that stepped forward and put her arm around the girl's quaking shoulders. But she could not stem the words that rolled from Stella's throat.

"I've hated Teddy Kent since I heard Aunt Ilse talking about how he tried to take my mother from my father." Here, Ilse Miller clapped a hand to her mouth in shame. "And I hate you, because you _are_ him!" And Stella whipped toward her mother. "I hate you, too."

"Stella!" Cecilia Redfern's tone was mildly reproving.

"I don't care," said Stella but she quavered as she said it. "If you knew what my mother had been like these years, you would, too. Oh, let go of me!—I want to get away from all of you!" She broke free of her beloved teacher's restraining hold, and ran for the house. The guests stood a moment longer, in mute disbelief, and then Teddy Kent strode away from them, around the corner of the house from whence he came, and vanished. The rest of the guests dissipated in twos and threes, talking in low voices. Millie did not even try to press any of her eats upon them. She simply left the food on the table and went to bury her face in her mother's lap.

It was Emily who cleaned things up, with numb hands and heart. Upstairs, she could hear Stella sobbing to shake the roof. But the thing that rent her own heart in two was not that her daughter had flung those hateful words at her. Stella was her life, and she would heal that wound, sometime. No: it was not that. It was the feeling she had gotten when she had seen Teddy Kent walk out of her life, again—and for the last time. There was no hope that they would ever be even friends, again. If she could not have him as—well, she wanted him as a friend, at least. And now that could never happen.


	22. Spring and Summer

The next months that followed were dark ones for Stella. There was no place in her life she could turn for comfort. Every time Miss Redfern talk to her, or looked at her, or even was near her, she writhed thinking that her pretty, beloved teacher, had seen her at her very worst. Truthfully, Miss Redfern thought no worse of Stella for her outburst, and loved her just as much. Through the spring and the last weeks of school before the summer holiday, she reached out to the wounded little girl, but Stella would not meet her half-way.

Stella had known that Pierrot was going to be going away to Queens in the fall, but now came the news that he had been accepted into a science program that would run this summer. He was going away, and she would miss him. Millie could not understand what had happened to her, happy Millie, but Pierrot could. She did not want to weep when he told her of his good fortune, his great luck in getting accepted to the program. She was happy for him, she _was_! It was just that she was so sad for herself. _Father gone_, she thought, as she cried into her pillow in her room. _Pierrot going. Not even Mr. Frederick to turn to, to distract myself. _Because Mr. Frederick was not real. He had been Teddy Kent all along.

And Mother—Mother was as gone to her as Father. Stella felt like an orphan. The Mother she thought she knew—Dean's wife—now belonged to Teddy Kent, and Stella saw that a part of her had belonged to him these many years. Stella hated her for it. _She_ was the reason for the hurt look in Father's eyes, at times. She was the reason they had never been able to go home, or live a normal life, in one place. Father had known that Mother preferred another man to him, and he had tried to keep her, the best—and only—way he knew how. Emily had brushed Stella's hair—had tucked her in at night—had played with her like a great big girl herself—had been wishing for, and wanting, Teddy Kent, through it all. Had maybe even wished, sometimes, that she could go back and rewrite the past—a past without Dean, and therefore without Stella, in it.

Emily, for her part, took things no more easily than Stella. She knew that another mother would go to the girl, and hold her, and tell her that it was not true, that she loved her father, and had never wanted another life. But Emily could not do that. She had lied to Stella throughout her long life, yes—but they had all been lies of omission. She could not go and tell the girl things that were outright untrue, and it _would_ be a lie if Emily said that she had never wished things had turned out differently. She loved her daughter, and it made the years with Dean, which were sometimes studded with sorrow, worth it, to have her. And she had loved Dean in her way. But she thought often of her wedding day—going down on her knees before Dean, before all their guests, and begging him to let her go to Teddy who was hurt, who needed her; her hot tears when he had refused to release her.

Cousin Jimmy found Emily crying in the barn and wound his arm about her. "Things are meant to happen in a certain way," he told her, with a spark of his old prescience. "I wondered at the meanness of Dean Priest all those years ago, in not letting you go. But I see now that it happened because you had to have your Star. Now you can have that life you want, Emily. Little Teddy Kent cares for you, as much as he ever did. I saw it in his face. He cares, still."

"How can I go and tell him that I do, when Stella hates him so much?" Emily wiped her nose. "Don't come and give me false hope, Cousin Jimmy. Just let me lean my head on your shoulder and cry a little. You are—you _always_ have been—a comfort to me."

He was not the only one. If Aunt Elizabeth with her eyes said that Emily had made a right mess of things, if Aunt Laura was too determinedly cheerful, if Ilse was too rankled with guilt to be a comfortable friend, then Gus Rankin was around to make her smile, and forget about things for a while. It was a starry June night when they went for a drive. They were gone for a long while, and when they returned, Gus let Emily off in the lane, and did not go in with her. Stella, watching from her window, wondered at that.

She heard Mother's tread on the stair and flew to her bed, took up a book and determinedly pretended to read it. Emily came in and sat on the foot of her daughter's bed. Once they had chatted this way every night; now it felt odd, and unfamiliar.

"Stella," Emily said softly. "Stella, Mr. Rankin has asked me to marry him. And I've said—yes."

She held up her hand, where a plain gold band with a very small diamond winked away. Stella cast her book down. Her eyes were large, and a little afraid.

"Mother—Mother, really? But—you don't love him, Mother."

Emily smiled, but there was something not right about it. "I do—in a way."

Stella was harsh. "How good you are, at loving people 'in a way.' Don't you think Mr. Rankin deserves better?"

Now Emily smiled properly. "I didn't think that you would care about Mr. Rankin's feelings. Gus is good for me, and he will…" She had been about to say that he would bring them together. They would leave New Moon, of course, and get a house somewhere else in Blair Water, and they would have to forge themselves together as a family. This great divide between mother and daughter would have to be mended.

But it was so—so final, Stella thought. Mother would not have another chance at happiness. She would be Emily Rankin, Mrs. Gus Rankin, until death did them part. Mother was, Stella realized, giving up a dream—giving it up, for her.

_I don't care_, Stella told herself. To her mother, she said, coolly, "I'm happy for you. When will it be?"

"The autumn," Emily sighed, sounding nothing like a bride-to-be. "October, I suppose."

"Mother…" Stella began, and Emily looked up, hopeful. _Tell me not to do it, _flashed her eyes. _Tell me_.

But Stella only said, "May I be bridesmaid? And Millie, too?"

Emily smiled. "And Ilse. We'll be a rag-tag bunch." But it was that _other_ smile, again—the one that did not touch her eyes.


	23. Plans and Undoings

The New Moon folks were stunned by Emily's announcement, but they had learned, by now, that there was no reasoning with her, when her mind was made up. So they had no choice, whatever they might feel about the matter, but to welcome Gus Rankin into their lives with open arms. It was not hard for them to do—they _liked_ Gus Rankin, even if they did not think he was the man who could make Emily happy.

He set about looking for a house for them, and since he wanted to get to now Stella a little better, he made it a joint effort. Every Saturday through June and July Gus would come to collect her in his motorcar and they would drive the length of the island, from Tignish to O'Leary, looking for a place to call home. Gus did not read real estate advertisements—he believed that your heart, not your head, should do the choosing of something so important as the place you would live. If you read about a house in an ad, you might be cowed by descriptions of window seats and turret rooms, only to find out, later, that the floors were creaky, the windows off-kilter, and the light poor.

"How are you supposed to find a house, then?" asked Stella curiously. If she, too, felt off-kilter at the way things were developing, she was at least interested.

Gus—he had asked Stella to call him that—crinkled his eyes at her. He had very warm, very brown eyes. Stella, whatever else she thought about him, at least liked his eyes. And the luxuriant brown moustache that he had grown, in the past few months, since her birthday. It gave him such a funny, old-fashioned air, like a soldier of some long-ago war.

"You don't find your house," he admonished her gently. "It finds you. You know as soon as you see it. A strange feeling comes over you, and it's like a magnet, pulling you forward. You fall in love."

Stella digested this for a moment. "How do you know so much about this?"

Gus laughed. "I made my fortune in real estate," he said easily. He was not bragging; Stella knew him well enough by now to know that Gus didn't brag. "I used to try to sell people houses that _I _thought they should buy. A mother with a young baby; a carpenter with his own business? One would need a nursery, the other a workroom. I had ideas of the place that they should have, and tried to get them to agree with me. I wasn't very successful. Finally, I learned that all I had to do was show them the place—and sit back and wait. When I saw that look cross their faces—starry-eyed—I jumped. There really wasn't anything for me to do at all." Gus slowed as they passed a hill, and pointed up at the house at the top of it. "What about this one, Stella?"

She looked at it critically. "It would be very nice for dreaming," she said, after a while. "But it is a lofty house—not in a good way. See those columns? It holds itself so proudly, so upright. It's a house that would never want to be your _friend_. You could live there, but it would never love you."

"Then this is not our house," said Gus certainly, and they drove on.

They saw many houses on their various trips. Little cottages, set back from the road in birch copses; saltboxes, so near the sea that the spray came up over the windows; imposing brick structures, clean and grand, in the heart of bustling villages; even one abode that could only be described as a 'mansion.'

"I could never live here," Stella said, panicking, when she saw it. But she needn't have. "Neither could I," said Gus. "And I know your mother wouldn't like it."

Gus wanted to find the perfect house for his bride, and he was full of suggestions for things that she must have. A nice room for writing—if she wanted to take that up again—a spacious kitchen, a pantry that would make such as Aunt Elizabeth weep tears of joy. Lots of trees—shadowy places—Gus might not be of the race of dreamers but he knew Emily well enough for that. Stella found herself almost loving him when she saw how much he cared for, and considered, her mother's wishes and well-being.

But at other times, when Gus spoke of Stella's mother, she came back to herself with a jolt as if she had been very far away for a little while. What they were doing felt like a game—she could, most of the time, pretend it was. Whenever she remembered that it was _real_, that they were _really_ choosing a house for the Rankin-family to be, she came out cold in gooseflesh. Would she ever sleep in a little room at the top of the stairs, down the hall from where Gus Rankin slept in a big bed with her mother? Would she see him every morning over breakfast; would she ever learn to love him, to want to call him 'Father?' No—that name was reserved to someone else, forever. 'Dad' then?—something jolly like that?

She also found that there was something enticing in the idea of being a family, in the way that other people were families. Not to live all over the world, and apart from the world, but in one place, among a crowd of other people. It would be—nice. There had been adventure and a wild, tangy solitariness in her previous life, but in this there would be something…settled. If she did not love Gus, at least she appreciated what he could offer them, though she did not admit it, even to herself.

They were driving back to Blair Water after one particularly fruitless day of searching when Gus turned down a little country lane that led deep into the heart of a spruce wood. "There's something back here," he said, "If I recall correctly. A little shingled house, with a sad air. Badly dilapidated, but with good bones. And close enough so that your aunts would not miss you, Stella."

It was the little, gray-shingled house that she had seen months and months ago, with Pierrot. _Who does it belong to? _She had asked then, and Pierrot had said nothing. Oh, it hurt her that this delicious little place had nobody to love it!

"It's boarded up," said Gus, turning the car off. "But let's go peep in the windows."

Through a chink, Stella could just make out the outlines of a sitting room. She though she saw the shadow of graceful white branches on the wall. There were chairs arranged up at the fireplace, as if the inhabitants of the house had been there only a moment ago. Stella shivered. Over the mantel was the portrait of a woman; a shaft of light fell directly on her face and lit it up. What an inscrutable face! Who had lived here? Why had they spent so much time setting all this out—and then left? Because Stella felt sure this house had never been lived in. But why? It was a place _made_ for living.

Gus Rankin was inspecting the shingles; weathered, but sturdy. "I bet we could get a good price for it," he said, thoughtfully. "If I only knew who owned it…"

"No." Stella's voice rasped in her throat. "I don't want to live here." What she meant was, _I don't want to live here with _YOU. But why not? It was close to New Moon, like Gus had said. And to the Burnley house—Millie could run over every day, and she could see Pierrot when he was home.

And there was that feeling that Gus had described: as though she were being pulled toward the house, unstoppably. It was that star-struck feeling. So much so that when Gus had wondered who the house belonged to, Stella had wanted to say: Why, it belongs to _me_.

* * *

They took a house in Shrewsbury, in the end. None of them had the love-light feeling toward it, but all of them—Gus, Emily and Stella—agreed that it would do in a pinch. The house was a clapboard affair, lacking in charm, but with a well-ordered pantry and a mysterious cellar that Stella, at least, loved. Millie wept when she heard they would be living so far away, but this was the age of motorcars, wasn't it? Her dad could run her over from time to time.

In August there was an art exhibition in Charlottetown. A famous British watercolorist was coming to give a talk on his art. He was very popular, and Gus joked to Stella that he had almost had to sell his eyeteeth to get them tickets. Just the two of them, since Emily would be away. She was going to New York, ostensibly to shop for wedding things. At least, that is what she told the New Moon people, because she did not want to get her—or their—hopes up. But in her bag, which she held on her lap on the train, there was a letter from Wareham's Publishing House, that outlined details of the meeting she would attend. Emily crossed her fingers and wished, like she had not in years. _If I cannot have him_, _at least let me have this, God. You are good. You will forgive me—even if my daughter can't_.

So Stella and Gus and Millie went to town, instead. They met the famous artist, whose watercolors Stella found pretty, if a little insipid. They also met Miss Cecilia Redfern, who had attended the exhibition with her parents, which she introduced to the little group with enthusiasm. "Mr. Gus Redfern," she said, "Miss Stella Priest, and Miss Emily Miller—these are my parents, Bernard and Valancy Snaith Redfern."

Mr. Redfern was a curious-looking fellow. One of his eyebrows was arch, and the other a triangle. His nose was snubbed and even his careful, expensive dress could not disguise something long-loosed and easy in his movements. Mrs. Redfern—Cecilia's mother—had a little pointed, feral chin and haunting eyes. They took the girls and Gus for ice cream, and Stella let hers melt while she sketched them very quickly in her book. Mrs. Redfern leaned over for a peep, and her mouth got very round, her eyes astonished.

"Look, Barney!" she cried. "Why, this is better even than the portrait the Great Allan Tierney once painted of me. How can you do it, child?" She turned to Stella, stroked her hair. "You've made me look exactly the way I do when I'm at my Blue Castle. I only look like that there, and nowhere else, so how did you know?"

"I could see _into_ you," Stella said seriously, and the Redferns did not laugh even if—hatred surged again in her heart—Gus Rankin did.

"Can you see into Cecilia?" Mr. Redfern joked. "And tell us if there's a fellow lurking there? We think there must be a man—that's the reason why she won't come home and marry Roger Kirk. Come, come, girls—school's not in session—you may spill the beans about your teacher."

Miss Redfern had flushed a bright pink. "Papa! I'm going to strangle you, once we are safely away from witnesses."

"I would be distressed to hear if there was any fellow," joked Gus Rankin to cover the silence. "Miss Redfern is the best teacher we've had around here in ages and we'd hate to lose her. Everyone loves her." Miss Redfern flushed an even deeper pink, at these words. "And most of the men here are scoundrels—myself included. We could none of us hold a candle to her."

Mrs. Redfern looked affectionately at Gus. "I like scoundrels," she said. "I married one myself, you know. Oh, how _sad_ I shall be if my Cissy-girl married a good, upstanding member of the community! Cis, can't you find yourself an artist? In my experience—present company excluded—they are some of the wickedest folk imaginable. Look out there, at all of them? Don't you see one to tempt your fancy?"

Stella followed Mrs. Redfern's hand with her eyes—and then she sat back, because she recognized a face among the crowd. Flashing eyes—dark, snapping hair—scowling face. It was Mr. Frederick—no! _It was Teddy Kent_.

She became aware of herself laying down her pencil and pushing back her chair, but it was as though she were watching from outside of herself. She walked, with the same feeling across the room, and then caught hold of Teddy Kent's coat as he was leaving. He whirled to face her, eyes blazing. They softened only the merest trifle to behold her.

"I just wanted you to know," said Stella in a low voice. "My mother is getting married." Ah! There is was—that gratifying flash of hurt, of sorrow, on his face. "To Mr. Gus Rankin. We are going to be happy. She _is_ happy. She doesn't need you."

How easy, Stella thought, watching him, how easy it was to tear a man down!—to undo him, brick by brick! And how hard it was for him to try and keep himself upright, when that had happened. Teddy Kent looked--well, he looked destroyed, as though something solid at his foundation had shifted. But he only nodded, and Stella was at once sorry. Sorry she had let her legs carry her over here. Sorry even that it would be Gus, and not Teddy Kent, who would be her 'Dad!' When she hated him! Why should it be? Oh, there was so much sorrow in the world, and it was so hard to give happiness! She did not like the way she felt at this moment. She remembered her father's peculiar satisfaction when he had said things like, "Writing again, Emily?" and Mother had had to whisk her papers out of sight. She loved him—but she did not want to be like _that_!

Teddy Kent was moving away. "Mr. Frederick!" Stella called, the old name on her lips. He turned. She wanted so badly to say _no, they aren't getting married, I was joking. You can have her. I don't like you, but I will help you. Because it is hard to give happiness, but I want to do it. _

But the time for that was past. She could have stopped it; it was too late, now.

"I wanted to let you know," she stammered. "I've learned to draw hands. Finally."

Teddy Kent smiled. He said, "I knew you would."

They stood there a moment longer, and then he blended into the crowd, and was gone. Stella went back to her friends with a peculiar pang in her heart.


End file.
